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Comment by ll01 | Hacker News Reader

Im a third year at a mid UK Uni and reading this I'm just baffled... I wouldn't have a chance...

The textbook is excellent and the course staff is almost always great at providing reasonable guidance. The earlier labs also do an excellent job of ramping up so that the increase in difficulty doesn't seem extreme. And being around dozens of other students in the same boat helps a lot, as well.

Several of the labs have a somewhat incremental process where you start out with an acceptable implementation and optimize in steps.

^ can second this. I TA'd the version of this at my uni (exact copy of the cmu course). Before this, we had students implement linked-list hashmaps which exposed students to working with void's.

not quite as intimidating, but the tests on this assignment are pretty harsh compared to previous assignments.

Third year CS??

I finished 4th year CS in Aus, and I'd only needed to touch a compiler twice in those 4 years.

The US courses tend to be a lot more academic focused, teaching you actual CS. Whereas a lot of other places try and give you things they expect you'll need in a work place, which tends to be experience with Java, MySQL, Python, and web.

That's too bad, as none of those "things you'll need in the work place" sound like they belong in upper year computer science, and, at least in my experience, it was those upper year courses that made the degree worthwhile / distinguished it from community college level curriculum.

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