[Tfug] CIS faculty at PCC west disavow existence of Linux classes

[James Hood]

Quoting Leo Przybylski <leo@leosandbox.org>:

> Sam,
> 
> I absolutely agree with. Most of the CS students that UA is churning
> out
> lack a lot of Computer Science fundamentals including contemporary CS
> theory (they are all programmed/indoctrinated little drones).
>

I was in the CS department at the U and now I'm in the ECE department
because of this. Many CS students I talk to only know computers from a
very high level programmer perspective. The ones that know more didn't
learn it from CS courses. IMO, I don't think this is necessarily a bad
thing because with the very common CS/Math double major, they can
develop faster, better, algorithms that can be applied to any
language/system. I chose ECE because it teaches from the ground up. I
feel like I have a much better idea of what's really going on inside a
computer than a CS major does.

On the other hand, ECE doesn't emphasize programming enough. 275, intro
to C, is a pretty terrible class. It leaves most students with a fear
rather than an understanding of programming. Plus, it doesn't teach good
programming practices, so their code is hardly readable. I took almost
all of my CS classes about 2 1/2 years ago and I thought the OOP classes
were very good. I've heard that the department has declined a bit since
then, but I can't verify that myself.

Just my 2 cents,

James

-- 
:%s/hate/love/g :)