Ask HN: How to best acquire theoretical computer science knowledge?

Post by rdc12 » Mon, Sep 09, 2013, 8:33 AM UTC

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #65

tel wrote: post #33

Read papers. Read lots of papers. Start with easy ones to learn how to best digest highly academic technical writing then keep pushing. CS is remarkable in how much of its academic knowledge is online, available, for free. Taking advantage of that resource is beyond key. If you know roughly what you want to learn, search out a seminal paper in that area. If it's deep CS, you'll probably find a good one from the 80s.…

In case you want to read papers but don't really know where to get started, here's my collection I've read over the years: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/315/articles/index.html ... feel free to browse through it and pick up anything that looks interesting. You'll probably want to scroll all the way to the bottom and work your way up the list. Many of the classics are in there, such as the Plan9 paper and Paxos M…

Any chance of some sort of tar of the papers?

Post by tspike » Tue, Sep 10, 2013, 8:01 PM UTC

jophde wrote: post #118

tspike wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the exact same thing. You only need to do the prerequisites. No, it doesn't matter where you do them, but it's obviously best if you do them at the same school you intend to attend, as you'll be able to get recommendations from professors in the same department, and obviously the courses will transfer fine. EDIT: FWIW, at the University of Colorado, I had to do 2 courses above calc 1 - for me that was calc 2 an…

That's a really a good point about the letters of recommendation. I think this is the route I will be going down. I had no idea how I was going to get the letters otherwise. Do you have to apply to take the prerequisites or do you just pay them and go?

At most schools, you can just take courses without a competitive admission process until you intend to enroll in a degree program.

Re: Ask HN: How to best acquire theoretical computer science knowledge?

Re: Ask HN: How to best acquire theoretical computer science knowledge?