Julien Vehent on 23 Oct 2011 08:05:39 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] ideas for class material 

On 22.10.2011 21:44, Andrew Craig wrote:
my question is exactly what you gave...input. thank you. To clarify, if any of you had the opportunity to have input for a class syllabus, what 
would you include.

We all learn differently, some by doing, some by reading and writing,
some by doing both.

thanks
Allow me to disagree: this is wrong. You need all of them to learn properly, especially in computer science. You cannot be a good technician/engineer/researcher without: - reading a shit lot of material, every day, some complex some not, in math, physics, electronic, computer architecture, etc... - building and maintaining infrastructures and dealing with the everyday's quirks of it - writing code and melting your brain trying to find that segfault bug somewhere deep in those 2000 lines of C 

You can try to do only one of those, and become really good at it.
But one day, you will interview with Google, a place where they only hire engineers who know all three extremely well, and you will understand how foolish that was. A sysadmin (or Site Reliability Engineer as they call them) will ask you to write a quick sort in Python, or a developer will come up with a problem that involves TCP window scaling.
It's all a matter of how much you want to invest in it. But for a student project, try to pick something that has a little bit of all 3: 
- a topic that requires reading some theory
- with the possibility to build an infrastructure and test the technology 
- and some piece of code to analyze and write

And write a paper about it :)


Hope that helps, and good luck with the project.

--
Julien Vehent - http://1nw.eu/!j
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