<p>Hi, I am looking to start getting ready for my plans of doing some computer programming in college at a very technical school (or wherever I end up). I was wondering, would it be worth it to do some self-teaching/take a course at a community college on a computer language and which one would be most useful to learn? I've been hearing a lot of stuff about python being the next big thing.</p>
<p>I recently took an online class on edX called “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming.” The coursework was done in Python, but I felt like the most valuable things I learned in that course were the computer science concepts rather than the particular computer programming language itself. The language probably doesn’t matter too much, anyways.</p>
<p>Double thanks. This is good to know about the conceptual aspect and you gave me the idea of an online course. For the people reading this in the future (as I often read threads on CC from 2006-2008), I am looking into a free course at: [Introduction</a> to Computer Science and Programming | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | MIT OpenCourseWare](<a href=“http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-00sc-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-spring-2011/index.htm]Introduction”>Introduction to Computer Science and Programming | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | MIT OpenCourseWare)</p>
<p>I don’t know much about it, but it’s in python, it’s supposed to teach computer science, and it’s free. I will probably edit this later with info on how it went.</p>
<p>Message talking about the course:</p>
<p>In this course, we will use Python. Python is a relatively recent addition to the universe of languages, and is still growing in popularity. I want to emphasize that this course is not about Python. You will certainly learn Python, and that’s a good thing. What is much more important, however, is that you will learn how to write programs that solve problems, given a set of basic primitives, and ways of combining them into more complex elements, that you can then abstract into primitives. This skill can be transferred to many languages.</p>