What Computer Science concepts should I know?
What concepts in Computer Science do you think have made you a better programmer?
My degree was in Mechanical Engineering so having ended up as a programmer, I'm a bit lacking in the basics. There are a few standard CS concepts which I've learnt recently that have given me a much deeper understanding of what I'm doing, specifically:
Language Features
- Pointers & Recursion (Thanks Joel!)
Data Structures
- Linked Lists
- Hashtables
Algorithms
- Bubble Sorts
Obviously, the list is a little short at the moment so I was hoping for suggestions as to:
- What concepts I should understand,
- Any good resources for properly understanding them (as Wikipedia can be a bit dense and academic sometimes).
Answer
Take a look at this blog post by Steve Yegge (formerly of Amazon, now at Google):
It goes into some detail about the the five most important concepts that developers should be required to know:
- Basic programming (including recursion, file I/O, formatted output, loops etc)
- Object oriented design (including design patterns etc). You should be able to produce sensible OO designs as well as understanding the concepts.
- Scripting and regexes.
- Data structures -- lists, sets, hashtables, trees, graphs, and so on -- as well as Big O notation and algorithmic complexity.
- Bits, bytes and binary numbers -- how numbers are represented within the computer, and how to manipulate them.