I plan to apply to UCSC and UCB next year. I’m fairly confident in getting into UCSC and UCB might be a bit of a reach for me but I think if I go ham, I have a shot. I’ve decided to major in Computer Science. I dream to be a part of developing video games but if that doesn’t work out I’d still have a programming degree to fall back on so I can keep my options open. Plus, they make some fat stacks. The problem is I don’t know jack about programming. All I do know is that I like to be on my computer for 12+ hours everyday if I ain’t really doing anything for school or extracurriculars. I’ve just been wondering what would be the best way to get going on Computer Science once I’m in college. Do I participate in projects even though I don’t know anything? How would I go about doing this? What should I look out for? I want to make the most of my experience, thank you.
P.S. Thoughts on codecademy? Might pick up on that over summer and learn what I can.
It would be beneficial to look at the school’s program and which courses you’d be taking in your first year. Usually, you will start by learning the fundamentals of object-oriented programming. You can’t really do anything without knowing something, but you can definitely prepare, read ahead, or learn visually with examples (such as through YouTube). I found this [url=<a href=“http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/%5DJava%5B/url”>http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/]Java[/url] programming website as well as the simple [url=<a href=“http://www.cplusplus.com/files/tutorial.pdf%5DC++%5B/url”>http://www.cplusplus.com/files/tutorial.pdf]C++[/url] handbook really helpful. Even though this seems to be the distant future, you could certainly propose working on a project together with your future classmates.
Game development, to some extent, involves many concepts and possibly some “advanced” mathematics background such as linear algebra, depending on the particular game. A simple dice game or hangman doesn’t require you to know very much. Board games such as Sudoku, however, require some more knowledge and possibly experience with GUIs. When it comes to RPGs, we’re talking about weeks of extensive programming.
I’ve never used CodeAcademy before - only YouTube videos and free online books, which works a lot better for me.
Some people learn to program by just trying it out (e.g. download Python, find some tutorials on the internet). Other people prefer a course setting.
There are some colleges that offer courses specifically designed for people who have never programmed before, and they’re reporting this works much better for beginner programmers than mixing them in with people who have programmed before in a weeder course. http://qz.com/192071/how-one-college-went-from-10-female-computer-science-majors-to-40/ has a good article on how and why this works; it mentions Berkeley, Duke, and Northwestern have similar programs.
Once you are comfortable programming, most universities these days seem to have hackathons and hacker clubs so you can meet others and practice programming.