I am trying to decide between taking AP CSA and AP CS Principles next year (I only have room for one). Since the principles course is new, I couldn’t find much information on it on this site and others. I was wondering which of these courses is more challenging and would be more worthwhile to take. Also, does it benefit your resume in any way if you take both classes? If I take the more challenging of the two, whichever it may be, would it be possible for me to self-study the other?
@CS1211 I didn’t take APCS A, but my best guess (judging by the AP course description [here](https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-computer-science-principles-course-and-exam-description.pdf)) is that APCS Principles is simply an overview of computer science topics but doesn’t get very deep, whereas APCS A is mostly Java programming and gets a little deeper. For example, APCS Principles mentions decidability theory and analyzing the run time of certain algorithms but doesn’t even get into big-O notation.
Thank you so much!