

10 Books that will Substitute A Computer Science Degree (debate?) - bdfh42
http://www.techoozie.com/10-books-that-will-substitute-a-computer-science-degree/

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dazzawazza
... and here are my 10 Lego sets that will substitute an Engineering Degree!

Degrees are not just about the literal content. They are three/four/five/
years of intense experience in a play pen where highly skilled people correct
your every move and thoughts guiding you toward a greater understanding.

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raganwald
I agree with your sentiment, however I note that the element of "intense
experience in a play pen where highly skilled people correct your every move
and thoughts guiding you toward a greater understanding" is very, very
institution, department, and professor-dependent.

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vecter
In my experience, it's more peer-dependent. In practice, I barely interact
professors, TAs, or "the department". All of my [school] learning has been
through grinding through psets, projects, or intellectual discussions with
friends.

~~~
raganwald
Fair enough. But I think we're in violent agreement on this: A degree problem
can be a lot more than what's between the covers of the books, but that is not
always the case.

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michael_dorfman
Strange list. Some great stuff on there, but if I were going to attempt to
substitute for an undergrad CS degree, I'd definitely have SICP on a list
ahead of APL, for example.

Of course, the whole topic is quite silly; if you really wanted to substitute
for a CS degree, the easiest way to do it would be to examine (for example)
the MIT course catalog, put together the appropriate course plan, and then
order the textbooks used by those courses. And, with the video lectures and
lecture notes showing up on OCW, you would actually be approximating (in a
loose sense) the experience, provided one actually does the coursework and
exams.

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Tichy
Nah come on, in the years it takes to get a CS degree, hopefully you'll touch
on more subjects than these. You'll also do several projects.

Also Godel, Escher, Bach is really more a popular science book, isn't it?
Enjoyable read that it was (when I was a teenager), I think it is actually
more confusing than actually helpful in understanding the underlying concepts.

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qhoxie
That title makes a lofty claim and does not really deliver. The books they
chose are not flawed, but in terms of ordering them and limiting them to 10,
some is left to be desired. Here are some I would add:

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

Introduction to Algorithms

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rsheridan6
Too bad we don't live in a culture with base 12 numbers.

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vecter
They're missing discrete math, probability, linear algebra, networks,
security, distributed systems, user interface design, interacting with other
computer scientists, and the labor of intensive problem sets and projects.
And, oh yeah, any practical experience building anything whatsoever.

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bbb
And not to mention shared-memory parallelism. Multicore anyone? Ever heard of
it?

Going the 10-books-will-do-route will also make sure that you won't get
exposed to specialized fields such as embedded and real-time systems, machine
learning, computational geometry, bio informatics, etc.

A degree is also about knowing that certain fields exist; you don't
necessarily need to have studied everything. You can read up on them when you
need specialized knowledge, but if you've never heard of some obscure field
because your "ten books" didn't mention it, then you are screwed.

At a good university you will be exposed to a much wider variety of topics
than any (reasonably sized) set of books will do.

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known
My first love <http://isbn.nu/9780070260016>

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sown
10 Books + a lot of practical experience. :)

