

Ask HN: How would a high schooler find CS mentor? - rxooo

How would a high school/college student go about finding a CS mentor?
======
mokash
Make the entire Internet your mentor. It's filled with information and answers
to all sorts of questions. Look at some programming tutorials such as
codecademy. Maybe find some books on computer architecture, learn about
mathematics that might apply to computer scientists.

Here are some links to get you started.

<http://learncodethehardway.org/>

<http://www.cplusplus.com/files/tutorial.pdf>

<http://www.saylor.org/majors/computer-science/>

<http://www.freetechbooks.com/>

<http://www.codecademy.com/>

<http://code.google.com/edu/>

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-
ava...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-
programming-books/)

Also, learn to use YouTube to search for answers. Check this video out.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6U-i4gXkLM>

~~~
xvolter
I would agree with using the Internet, though I would not limit to any
particular site, tutorial, or guides. I personally learned most of the
programming I know from Google searches on per-case needs - the easiest
solution is find something you want to create - way back when my project was
to recreate MySpace - nowadays it may be a mobile app, a web services, or
whatever you desire - then start building it - as you need to accomplish
something new, learn that bit. You can also escalate your project if you start
off small and build it - such as if you want to create a multiplayer mobile
app, there are a ton of steps you can break up into smaller projects to learn
all the aspects.

I find that people who learn CS from non-top-tier-tech colleges or from books
tend to be limited in their knowledge, relying more on books and reference
sheets than stronger programmers who learned by trial and error. People who
learn how to program from external sources tend to be more narrow in their
programming styles, following a single type or development, programming,
project structure, and even languages - many are so limited they struggle to
learn a new language, when a stronger program can pickup new languages quickly
and entirely new programming styles.

Of course this is limited to programming for the most part. If you are going
to be more focused on another aspect, the approach may be different. Learning
hardware is more hands on and is harder to do through Google searching - in
this aspect of CS, I'd strongly recommend some books to assist - also taking
apart and rebuilding a computer or laptop is always fun if you haven't done
so.

There are also other aspects to CS - if you are more descriptive with what you
want to learn HN may be able to give some better replies.

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lumberjack
For what it's worth I never needed a mentor for CS related studies and I
ventured as far as going through the Dragon Book which isn't usually freshman
material. Thankfully CS correlates heavily with programming and for everything
programming there are many good communities online waiting to help you out.
You can post purely theoretical question on StackOverflow or other
StackExchange sites and get a decent response pretty quickly.

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orangethirty
Shoot me an email. Over at Nuuton we appreciate young hackers. There is a
small group of them coding up with Lisp and Python.

