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All you CS majors

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Kanno:
I'm planning on majoring in it too.  How much programming experience do you need before you start CS courses?  I'm just getting all my math courses done, and want to be prepared.

Do they start you from scratch, or are you expected to know anything?  I know bare minimum programming, if that.  I can make "guess the number games" in c++ and various "hello world" programs.  

I also run on a mac, but I'm expecting to at least be able to use the unix side of things (another thing I need a refresher on) to be able to get along in class.

So, basically..  what's CS like?

Samari:
It's really dependant on what school you go to.  Some start you off making you go through courses to learn specific languages while others might not even offer (m)any programming courses.  In the early/intro courses they'll probably do quick tutorials on the languages being used and offer extra help outside of class.  I know at Notre Dame the mentality is "once you know how to program you can pick any language up in about 30 minutes."  Every school is different though.

jhocking:
At Carnegie Mellon you aren't (or at least weren't, when I was there a few years ago) expected to know programming coming in, but you are expected to learn fast.  There's a required intro programming class that is a semester of learning C++ from scratch, and then after that you're pretty much expected to learn programming on your own.  To even get into CS requires being good at all your highschool classes, especially math, so if you take a programming class in highschool you better do well in it (and you can probably skip the intro programming class later,) but there is no programming pre-requisite.

est:
same with my course.  they start you out with the bare basics and build from there.  i mean, what do they expect?  you're coming into it from highschool, so you really shoudln't have that much experience anyways.

torg:
well... when i started, we only were told the theories: math, theory of software design, theory of programming languages (no actual language), hardware basics and so on.  we were supposed to learn an actual programming language by ourselves and nobody told us things like "you solve that problem in that way in your language". most of the time the theory was completely disconnected from the things you actually do with a computer.

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