[jonmb]

My fiancee and I are both studying computer science at a large university. She's graduating in late 2014, I'll be in early 2015.

In terms of employment as a developer, sometimes I wonder if we would have been better off attending one of these San Fran developer schools. I wonder though how much of the fundamentals do they learn? Do they ever hear the words "Big-Oh"? Do they know what a binary tree is?

And then I wonder -- does it matter? They're getting $90k offers. Perhaps these things don't matter as much, at least for web development.

So I suppose this is one of the benefits of a traditional path: you're well prepared for many types of development, not just web. The web is pretty cool though. :)

--

Question: if one wanted to teach themselves at home, is there an online curriculum that covers the same topics as these schools do?

[kyro]

There is no shortage of online classes for teaching how to code, from Udacity to Coursera to Codecademy to OCW, but what these lack, which I believe to be the most important part of learning effectively, is interaction with teachers, mentors, and other classmates. At times I'm surprised no one seems to be attacking that part of online education.

[jonmb]

Right, I know of Udacity and Treehouse and those other services, but I don't believe (just from checking them out) that they go into the same kind of hands-on training that a 10 week, in-person 12 hour/day course would.

[nicolethenerd]

It's not a full online curriculum, but the pre-work for the Flatiron school (http://prework.flatironschool.com/) is a pretty solid introduction to the basics.

[jonmb]

Nice! Thank you.