What Post-Secondary Courses do I need to be a Web Developer?

Question

I'm going to be finishing up High School this year and moving onto either University or College. However, after looking at some course lists, I'm perplexed - what types of courses (or which category [such as computing science]) do I need to start looking at in terms of enrollment?

My goal is to ultimately have a career developing websites in PHP or ASP.NET, so I know what I want to do; just not how to get there.

Which types of courses have you accomplished devs taken? How have they worked out for you?

Also, which type of institution generally offers the best career opportunities? By some local devs I've been advised to attend a University; despite the longer course lengths, it would apparently open more doors for me down the road. According to them, College offers a quick in/out approach to get in the work field quicker, but the credentials aren't good enough to higher-up jobs. What do you think?

Answer 1

You don't actually need any formal post-secondary education to be a developer. I have some, but rarely put it to any use in my work.

A lot of developers study a computer science-type curriculum, which I did. It was interesting, but mostly not directly applicable to anything I do in the real world.

Answer 2

My best recommendation, coming from somebody who is still attending University, and working as a freelance web developer, is to go CS. It might have a lot of stuff you don't think you need, but it teaches a lot of information which you can use when applied to scenarios here and there. It also helps discipline you in just general programming, which opens up doors later if you think that Web Dev isn't for you, but you like application development.

Good luck :)

Answer 3

I've been working in web development since 1998 and went to university from 1993-1997, so beware that what I did is somewhat dated in many ways.

I took a 4 year Honour's Bachelors program at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and worked in the US and Canada since my graduation.

Aside from the required Computer Science courses I had to take, there were a few others that I found useful:

1. Advanced Mathematics courses - Skewed toward those wanting to study Pure Mathematics, these courses were smaller than the general ones,e.g. my first couple of courses had at most 80 students and it shrank from there over the following year and a half down to only a handful of us in the last ones.

2. First year language courses - I took French and Russian. I'd recommend taking one with a Latin and one without a Latin alphabet to give a different perspective on how language is used and how much of a struggle it can be when learning something from scratch. Besides I found these to be rather easy courses that required attendance and participation in class rather than many hours outside of the classroom working on the material.

3. Higher level Math courses - This would be 3rd and 4th year Math courses which I took enough to get a second major and a minor ultimately that was useful in seeing some algorithms in use as well as round out my exposure to other Math concepts like groups and graphs.

4. 4th year Computer Science courses - For myself I had the follow eclectic mix of courses: Algorithm Design and Analysis, Computational Complexity Theory, Symbolic Computation, and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. The first was good for giving me ideas on where to start if I need to find a way to solve a problem as well as show many uses of different ideas. The Complexity course was really neat and gave me a take-home final that tested my ability to handle it as it was a 2 week, 10 questions in random order of difficulty type of exam. Symbolic Computation was neat in how it complemented Numerical Analysis in terms of trying to perserve precision by leaving constants in for things like square roots, or various Mathematical constants like pi or e.

I did have other courses but they didn't have as big an impact on me as these did. I'd agree with the others that a university degree is likely to open more doors as that CS degree is a rather common requirement. My uncle also works in IT but without that degree he has had some difficulties finding jobs at times.