Ask HN: Which computer science course should I take?

3 pointsbutterfaith3 comments

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone could provide some insight into which course I should take in my last semester, Database Concepts or Distributed Systems. I don't know much about either of those, and I'd like to take the one that would be more useful for me in my career. I'm hoping to go into web development.

Thanks!

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my vote is database concepts. With the rise of PaaS options out there the need to be able to build distributed systems yourself is lessening (unless it's referring to decoupled systems, such as standalone API endpoints) and falls more into the sys-admin domain. However database concepts will directly relate to your web dev career and will help improve your architecture design and general programming skills as well.

Take one pass fail and letter grade the other? If both sound cool take both.

I would suggest databases is probably more relevant to web development.

I am in a similar situation, my answer is to take as much of the Stanford db class over the break as possible, and take the alternate at school. Although the deadline for all the exercises have passed you can still watch the videos and do the exercises / quizzes. http://www.db-class.org

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