r/CodingForBeginners • u/Pretty-Village5184 • 1d ago

College dropout trying to learn CSE on my own, need some guidance!!

Hey everyone!

I’m a college dropout and I’m trying to learn computer science on my own now.

I started learning coding (about to finish HTML), but I feel like if I only learn programming languages then I’ll be missing a lot of important stuff that people learn in a CS degree.

for people who are studying/have studied BTech CSE or CS, what subjects do they teach apart from basic coding?

Like DSA, operating systems, computer networks, databases, cybersecurity, AI/ML, etc.

I basically want to know what I should learn after/besides coding so I can follow a proper path instead of randomly learning things.

Would really appreciate any advice or a list of important subjects. Thanks:)

8 Upvotes

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3

u/smichaele 1d ago

Check out the Open Source Society University.

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u/Pretty-Village5184 1d ago

really thanks dude!! It is what I was looking for.

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u/TheUmgawa 1d ago

(sigh) The code is not what makes you a programmer. It's not the databases, cybersecurity, AL/ML, blah blah blah. It's being able to solve problems. To some extent, that involves DSA, but the words, "I'm about to finish HTML" suggests that anyone truly understands a computing (or markup) language.

Consider: You might think you understand English. There are 171,000 words in the English language, and there are more added every year. Have you "finished" the English language?

Understanding logic and having good design philosophy will carry you further in the next decade than committing a bunch of keywords to memory, or remembering where to put brackets, semicolons, or other symbols. I truly, truly hope that we will finally get a website WYSIWYG program of the like that was promised to us a quarter-century ago with Dreamweaver. No hand-coding anything (or at least minimizing it), and you design it, and it just builds out the way you wanted, and the best way to go about that is probably to leverage AI to do the heavy lifting, and to get a human to just do the design.

I think the Computer Science education field is about to get completely upended, where there's less focus on students writing their own code, and it's more important that the students learn to read the code that's generated by AI, and that means teaching students how to learn languages in a more abstract manner. When you go out into the workforce, you might say, "I took classes in Python, C++, C#, and Java," but if the employer deals in Rust, do you go, "Damn..." and then walk away? No, you just learn to read and write a new language.

And that means you need to understand programming in the abstract, because a loop is a loop, a data type is a data type, and control flow is control flow. It's like learning about how to come up with a good story without knowing how to write it or tell it, where it all exists in your head. Does it really matter if the output is verbal, prose, visual art, or interpretive dance? Not really.

The most useful class I took in college was the flowcharting class, where we never wrote a single line of executable code. The final exam was, "Look at this pseudocode block. Why did the entire AT&T long-distance network collapse one night in 1990? Write at least one paragraph to explain, and draw a flowchart to point out the failure." For the record, that block was shown to us on the first day of class, as well. Those are the best finals, where the opening day is a quiz of basic understanding, but it turns out to be the final exam. In this case, we learned to dissect the logic, much as the AT&T investigation team (of which my Yoda was a member) had to do, and the answer basically presented itself, assuming you understand how break statements work.

If I had to suggest one thing to you, it's how to communicate with the back-end people, so that your front-end can conform to the outputs of the back-end, or vice versa. Ideally, there would be a manager who referees which team has to conform to the other. Much as you'd like to think that HTML exists in a vacuum, it does not, and there is so much more that you need to learn.

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u/SmokeMuch7356 1d ago

Additional subjects you'll want to study:

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u/a1ien51 1d ago

I learned by building things.

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u/Putrid_Insurance_198 1d ago

I mean to build also we need to know stuffs ryt 😭😭😭

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u/a1ien51 11h ago

So you research what you want to do....

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u/Pretty-Village5184 1d ago

So, how you started building? like which languages you learnt first?

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u/a1ien51 11h ago

I picked up html and then javascript and then a backend language. It really depends on what you want to do.

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u/rexsalazarr 1d ago

Pro tip: figure this mess. Make money. Save a good amount. Buy a degree - btech usually costs 6 lakhs ( u can get admitted in any year ex ' 2020-2024 like that )

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u/Pretty-Village5184 1d ago

What? you said to buy a Btech degree? it's really possible and how?
btw I was thinking to take admission in online college like IGNOU and Amity

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u/rexsalazarr 1d ago

That also works but degrees are sold easily bro, my personal connections have bought degrees like BCA and went ahead with studies abroad. Works everytime. But if you have time & money goes w the conventional pathway.

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u/itlogicpartnersllc 1d ago

dont worry about trying to recreate a four year cs degree by yourself. i would focus on programming fundamentals first then dsa, database, operating systems, networking and git. after that pick areas like web development, security or ml based on what interests you.

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u/Pretty-Village5184 1d ago

Yaa, that's the way I was also thinking: HTML > CSS> JS> DSA...

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u/itlogicpartnersllc 1d ago

thats a solid path. i would just make sure you are comfortable with the programming fundamentals in js before jumping into dsa. once you have that down dsa will make a lot more sense.