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Ask HN: My friend wants to get in on CS. How should she start?

3 points by snihalani ↗ HN
My friend (a student in college) would like to learn computer science. She approached me asking good areas of research in computer science. Research work in college sometimes may or not work in sparking full interest into CS. What's the best way for one to get in on CS? What sparked you in to CS?

3 comments

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lsiebert
What sparked me in to CS?

I was in college, getting a Bachelor's degree in Psychology, and was invited to a grad level class on item response theory. We were using R, and had to analyze 2400 items, and each was taking 3 - 6 minutes because of the function. That would be 5 -10 days if we did them all, and people were cutting it down to 50 item problem sets and emailing the teacher, and trading sets of items back and forth, and still running computers for a long time.

I figured out how to optimize the algorithm so that each took a few seconds, by coming up with a very naive version of something like a binary search. Having it be an order of magnitude faster was cool, but coming up with the idea myself was what made me interested in CS.

tagabek
The best way to get into Computer Science is to start doing something specific that interests you.
marquis
She needs to have an idea that interests her to work on, that has a specific goal. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097155 as another good example. There are heaps of places to start depending on the language she's interested in, and it's really important she does some online CS classes from Stanford or something so she gets what is happening in the computer from the very beginning. A bit of theory goes a long way!

Once she has a base understanding she might look at getting an internship to learn the ropes, if she isn't tied to a job right now or needs good income immediately.

I've been involved with teaching girls to code so the above comes from experience.