<p>Im just wondering, I'm a junior in my high school and I need to know if I have to prepare anything to go to college for this major. Do I need to be fluent in C++ or what?</p>
<p>It probably depends where you go, but I know many people who studied CS in college with little-to-no previous experience (take everything I say not-too-seriously, because I'm also a junior in high school).</p>
<p>A lot of people, it seems like especially guys but maybe I'm over-generalizing, go into CS in college not really knowing what they're getting into. Obviously you'll be doing a lot of programming for CS, but at the higher level it becomes more like math and there's more theoretical work. Mostly the people who have experience witih "CS" did a lot of programming, coded games, were webmasters, did hacking, etc. They might find the into classes easier, or might place out of them, but you'll probably be able to catch up, and you may have something of an advantage of coming in neutral, rather than having a firm mindset that isn't really what CS is about.</p>
<p>If you do want to learn a language, C++ probably isn't the one--as much as people hate Java (myself included), it's better at least than C++. If you think you might be interested in more hardware-related things, robotics, etc., C is a useful language, though probably not the best if you're just learning (do you have other CS experience?) Python and Lisp are some of the more useless languages in terms of actual applications, but Python has nice simple syntax for learning basic programming and OO concepts and Lisp is very powerful, if a headache at first and not that popular in industry.</p>
<p>But, like I said, I don't know much. Hope that helped a little, though.</p>
<p>I'm a freshman who's considering being a CS major. I'm taking my first class right now, so yeah, I don't know as much as someone who's been in the major for awhile. But here are my two cents, anyway:</p>
<p>I had no prior experience (though many in my class did, and some placed out of my class), and it's working out fine. It's obviously harder, especially since I didn't know a whole lot about how computers work and have had to teach myself some stuff along the way. But it's definitely doable.</p>
<p>And at my college, they teach C++ in the intro classes, then Java. They wanted us to know the details first, before going into the more object oriented programming. That's a horrible explanation, but as I said, I've only been in the class for a few weeks.</p>
<p>Hope that helped at least some. At the very least it bumped your topic.</p>