#ask derrick

Software development is what people tend to think of when studying computer science. This typically involves wanting to work in the industry as someone who develops code based on what a client or company wants. You will take courses about the software development process, such as software testing and agile development. There aren’t really any languages I would recommend, since this is such a broad field, but good places to start are C++, Java, C#, and Python. If anything, I would suggest reading further, since software development can be broken down into the other categories. An example of Java code can be seen below (and C++ and C# basically look like this as well).

Game development is another topic people think of with computer science. A lot of our generation grew up playing video games and somewhere along the line thought that they would want to develop games as well. Game developers need to have a good understanding of computer graphics (such as using OpenGL), physics, and computer programming in C++ and C#. A great place to start is looking into Unity. It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it’s what a lot of industry people use today.

Web development has been, currently is, and will always be in high demand. Most interactions people have with computers are through websites, so of course there’s a lot of companies whose development revolves around websites. The standard languages to learn are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, although if you want an edge up, look into JavaScript libraries and frameworks, like Angular and Node.js. Also, W3Schools will be your best friend. It’s hard to show examples of this that aren’t hundreds of lines long, so here’s a little example showing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript similar to a W3Schools example.

Data science is exploding right now. The world has so much data and we’re just now beginning to analyze all of it. Say you have the history of every user that has ever been shown your ad and who clicked on it and when. Could you use that to determine anything about the effectiveness of the ad, time of day, where it’s displayed, and if they’ll click again? That’s data science. Typical courses include Statistical Computing, Data Mining, and Machine Learning. Typical languages for data science include R and Python. One subtopic that’s really big is machine learning. Can you take the data that you have and have a program “learn” off that data and make predictions about the future? Take a look at this Python code that analyzes a data set and is able to predict whether or not breast cancer is present based on a few attributes:

Information systems is the foundation of both web development and data science, as it involves how and where we store our information and data. You’ll study database management and possibly some cloud storage, since this is usually where we store things. You will want a strong understanding of data structures if you really want to learn the best ways to store things (I’ll give you a hint, databases usually use a variation of Binary Search Trees). You’ll also learn how to retrieve and manipulate the data that is stored. The languages you’ll want is SQL (rather MySQL or NoSQL) and PHP. Some MySQL code for creating a schema with tables will look like this.

Computer engineering is a close friend of computer science, but is mostly focused on the hardware side of things. Computer engineering is all about how you build the computer system. You will spend a lot of time learning the physics that goes into computer design, namely electricity and magnetism. Some classes would include Circuit Analysis, Signals, and Digital Systems, but a lot of it is up to you.

Systems & Architecture is similar to computer engineering, as you’re still focused on being close to the hardware, but you’re more interested in the software side. This was my favorite section of computer science, because you get to learn about computers from a brand new perspective and see how they work down to the electricity flowing through it. Typical courses include Computer Architecture, Operating Systems, Parallel Systems, and the like. You will learn languages like C and Assembly so you can get a good grasp of how fast and powerful a computer can be since you’re almost talking directly to it. For example, this C code is typical practice for interacting with dynamic libraries.

Theoretical computer science is a very intriguing study. Instead of learning about how all these different languages can be applied, you look into what computers are actually capable of. The main courses in any theoretical computer science section are Programming Language Theory, looking into how can you design and classify a programming language, Algorithm Analysis and Design, the different paradigms used to solve different problems, and Theory of Computation, studying what problems can be solved by computers and how quickly can they be solved. Studying this is a good way to get a job in the government, as organizations like the NSA are always looking for people to work on cryptography, which has a strong background in theory.

Scientific computing is the mix of computer science and applied mathematics. You take your understanding of programming and mathematical theory to create computer algorithms to solve problems as fast as they can (and maybe faster than ever before)! You’ll want to have a very strong understanding of linear algebra (the study of matrices), since a lot of computational tasks can be done effectively and efficiently using matrices. Typical courses include Numerical Linear Algebra, Numerical Analysis, and Partial Differential Equations. For this, languages like MATLAB (or its free counterparts Octave or Scilab), Mathematica, and even Fortran are your best bets. A typical career can involve becoming a researcher, or working for a company that relies on the most optimized mathematical code, such as a government agency or somewhere in the finance world. Here’s an example of some code written in Octave to analyze a waveform and reproduce it as a series of numbers (hey, I did a post about this earlier!)

Bioinformatics is the love child of computer science and biology. In this study, you will use what you know about computer science and programming to better understand biological data. You can use this to study the human body, such as the human genome, so we as humans can have a better understanding of what makes us human, or you can apply it and develop medical software. One of my friends got a PhD in bioinformatics and she now writes the software for heart monitors. Since this is somewhat similar to data science, you’ll want to learn Python and R.