Ask Slashdot: Modern Web Development Applied Science Associates Degree? 246
First time accepted submitter campingman777 writes "I am being asked by students to develop an associates of applied science in modern web development at my community college. I proposed the curriculum to some other web forums and they were absolutely against it. Their argument was that students would not learn enough higher math, algorithms, and data structures to be viable employees when their industry changes every five years. As part of our mission is to turn out employees immediately ready for the work force, is teaching knowledge-based careers as a vocation appropriate?"
Yes (Score:5, Informative)
I work in a company writing online billing software. We use Perl and Ruby. We don't need people who know quicksort vs. bubble sort - we need people who understand browsers, and AJAX calls, and JSON, and business logic. I never touch anything more complicated in math than basic algebra.
Javascript, CSS, and something other than PHP are what you need to know, with a leavening of SQL and XML. Screw all that CompSci crap - we don't use it in 99.9% of our code.
Re:Not necessarily true... (Score:2, Informative)
If language matters to the CS program, they are doing it wrong - CS is about understanding how to create programs - learning how to design is the important bit, the actual code produced is just an exercise. While there are different libraries and tradeoffs for mobile vs. PC programming, the fundamental ideas are readily transferable.