The courses that were mentioned were all 100 level courses. Can anyone who went to Stanford(or knows the courses) comment on how technical they actually are?
It's a good sign if these are actual technical courses, but if they're just Word/Excel "programming" non-technical courses, we're just seeing a lot of people padding their resume in a bad economy.
Come on, you think a computer science class at Stanford is Word/Excel? Fortunately, they created a search engine that let me find the class in question: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/ It's Java programming.
>Come on, you think a computer science class at Stanford is Word/Excel?
Intro, non-technical course? These are more common than you think. CS105(https://agora.cs.illinois.edu/display/cs105/Course+Syllabus) at UIUC is a course that covers exactly that(it was 101 when I went there). It's meant for non-engineering or science students to cover a general education credit. CS101(which was 105) is in C and matlab, and that covers some more techincally difficult stuff. This is meant for technical non-CS majors.
CS125 is the true intro CS course, which covers data structures, recursion, etc.
Keep in mind that neither 101 or 105 actually count towards a CS degree in any capacity(either major or minor), so those aren't courses that anyone getting a CS degree would take anyway.
The first two classes (106A and 106B) are very techinical, though I'd hesitate to let anyone who hadn't taken classes beyond them to work on a piece of software I had control over.
I think a good metric for classes is the final assignment, since it captures "how far" the class goes. For reference, the final assignments are:
106A --- It varies, but has recently been a text-based "Adventure"-style game (in Java) that requires tracking the map, player state, various objects and their capabilities, etc. I think there might also be a small graphical component.
106B/X --- Again, it varies, but the best assignment (in my view) is a BASIC interpreter that implements both a REPL and stored programs. All C++, it's about building a big list of abstract expressions of different types (assignment, etc) that can be executed by walking that list (taking advantage of dynamic dispatch) and tracking global program state. It's a nice intersection of data structures and (very simple) recursive descent parsing.
107 --- A heap allocator to implement malloc(), realloc(), and free(), written on top of mmap(). A fantastic assignment.
All the 106A/B/X classes are a good 10-20 hours of programming per week, and I know many people who were interested in CS but were scared off by the 106 series. There is a much less technical intro course, CS105, that's more of an introduction to computers rather than computer science, but I don't think this article is talking about that one.
It's a good sign if these are actual technical courses, but if they're just Word/Excel "programming" non-technical courses, we're just seeing a lot of people padding their resume in a bad economy.