Thinking of studying Computer Science at university?
Top universities aren’t just interested in what you’re doing at school, they want to know about all the extra things you’re doing: what they call the supercurriculum.
This page gives some suggestions on how you can add depth to your studies.
Of course, you don’t need to be applying to university in order to follow these suggestions. Anyone with an interest in computers should find this list useful.
Get Coding
If you don’t want to be a better coder you really need to consider if Computer Science is the subject for you. If you do want to be a better coder, here are some ways to improve your skills
- The Euler Project is a set of problems that teach you good coding practice as you solve them.
- Get your school to enter you for the British Informatics Olympiad
- Everyone should know HTML and CSS. Sign up for the free course on https://www.codecademy.com/ or follow the tutorials here: https://www.w3schools.com/
- Take a look at the Be a Better Coder pages on this blog
- Join GitHub and learn good practice from other people’s code
Should I Learn another Programming Language?
Yes… but only if you’re really confident with your first language. It’s a good idea to learn a language that does things in a completely different way. Learning a functional language such as Haskell will give you a completely different take on programming. You can get a taste for Haskell here on my blog
Linux
Have you tried the Linux Operating System? There are plenty of websites that will explain the benefits of Linux and will get you started using it, but first you’ll need to get hold of a copy.
VirtualBox is free software that lets you run other operating systems. Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution with lots of support.
There are lots of tutorials online showing you how to run Linux on your Windows machine using VirtualBox. Here’s one example: https://itsfoss.com/install-linux-in-virtualbox/
Reading List
Computer books can be expensive. You could try asking your school librarian to order a copy.
- The Code Book by Simon Singh
- Learn Python 3 the Hard Way by Zed A Shaw
- Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
- Seventeen Equations that Changed the World by Ian Stewart
- Linguistics Made Easy by Jean Aitchison
- The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
Tony Ballantyne Tech 