What Computer Science Students Should Learn

Sunday February 22nd, 2009

Over the years there have been debate over what computer science students should learn (at university level). Arguably one of the most fundamental things to learn is functional programming - as I also wrote a little about in my blogpost Lamda Redux in C++ back in October 2008.

I've recently found the blogpost The Big Picture from the blog Software Carpentry run by Gregory Wilson, which lists a reasonably set of skills to teach computer science students:

• Clean coding (both micro-level readability and macro-level modularity).
• Version control.
• Process automation for building, testing, and deploying software.
• How to package software for distribution and deployment.
• Managing information and workflow (from bug trackers to blogs).
• Consuming data:
  • Text (line-oriented parsing with regular expressions).
  • Hierarchical (XML).
  • Binary.
  • Relational.
• Building desktop GUIs and visualizing data.
• Basic security: public/private keys, digital signatures, identity management.
• Publishing data and providing services on the web.

The blogpost goes on with a broader range of topics, so I'll suggest you read the entire blogpost.

Mr. Wilson even have a nice page at software-carpentry.org offering lecture material fully ready.