Computer science is different from many other disciplines (like electrical engineering). It is more like a professional school (such as culinary schools), which emphasizes practical works instead of subject studies because many IT companies want the new recruitees to start contributing immediately. There are three kinds of computing personnel:

• Developers:
  
  
  • Positions (plenty): Developers of front-end and back-end web pages, mobile apps, and all kinds of software
  • Skills (more stable): Programming languages (such as C++ and Java), web programming, mobile app development, data processing and management including databases, and data structures & algorithms


• Practitioners:
  
  
  • Positions (not many): Experienced personnel like data scientists, database or system administrators, security analysts, and network architects (more applications & configuration and less development)
  • Skills (based on the needs of companies): Databases, data warehousing, data lake, Hadoop, MapReduce, Linux, SPSS, SAS, Cogno, Matlab, Tableau, etc.


• Researchers:
  
  
  • Industrial positions (few and based on the needs of corporations): High quality personnel required for the advanced areas like artificial intelligence, security, computer vision, autonomous driving, and speech recognition
  • Academic positions/trends (few and changed according to the government policies): ❓ ⇐ artificial intelligence ⇐ big data ⇐ high-performance computing ⇐ security ⇐ (mobile) networks

Unless you have an impressive resume or a strong connection, practicing tens or hundreds of questions posted at the LeetCode is a must in order to secure a job at corporations (like Google and Facebook). Otherwise, your chance of answering the questions correctly is low because of their high difficulty and time constraint. In addition, you need to create LinkedIn pages to show your achievements, and may consider uploading your projects to the GitHub to showcase them.

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Remark I: Definitions, terminologies, and theories will be discussed minimally in this course. Instead practical works and programming knowledge will be emphasized and enforced.

Remark II: Java may be the most important production language, and the only effective way to learn a programming language is practicing, instead of studying concepts or writing some testing programs.

No pain, no gain 😂

Remark III: According to a study, students in computer-science courses learn much more by building large-scale exercises instead of many small-scale test programs, which give fragmented knowledge contrary to solid understanding of the language.

Remark IV: Remote work is a trend for IT workers. This course also allows you to learn how to do it by using the VPN (virtual private networks) to connect to our Linux server undcemcs02.und.edu, and having the exercises set up at the server and be accessed from the clients.

Instructor’s qualification: The instructor has more than five years’ experience in programming language research, design, and implementation. He designed and implemented a LISP/PROLOG mixed language system for AI (artificial-intelligence) developers including YACC-like software, UNIX-like editor, LISP compiler, PROLOG compiler, heap storage management system, and POPLOG virtual machine for which both LISP and PROLOG compilers generate code by writing about 20,000 lines of C code.

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University of North Dakota Course Description (CSCI 280) —
An introduction to the concept and execution of object-oriented programming, using an appropriate language. Includes an introduction to object creations, classes, inheritance, interfaces, exceptions, overloading, and more.

Java from Wikipedia —
Java is a general-purpose programming language that is concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, and specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine regardless of computer architecture.

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) from Wikipedia —
It is a programming paradigm based on the concept of “objects,” which can contain data (attributes) and code (methods). A feature of objects is an object’s procedures that can access and often modify the data fields of the object with which they are associated. In OOP, computer programs are designed by making them out of objects that interact with one another.

Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) —


Internet-Enabled Java System Construction Steps —