April 14, 2003
A: FROM MENTOR ESHE PICKETT IN IL
The computer fields that deal with programming are computer science and computing information systems in addition to similarly name programs. Should you decide to go this route, you will need to take math through high level calculus, in addition to math courses that are used in programming such as linear algebra, which is heavily relied upon in computer graphics. Programming courses will include a machine coding course such as lisp or scheme, object oriented coding languages including (but not limited to) C++ and Java, you will also take several courses that deal with programming for the internet, here you will cover HTML, DHTML (these are both languages that the web browser interprets to display web site pages on the internet), ASP (a language to help browsers and databases exchange/store/retrieve information), Javascript (no relation to Java), a databases course, operating systems (think Microsoft Windows or Macintosh), compilers (the things that translate computer lang!
uages into machine code, ones and zeros, so the computer can understand and perform the desired action), these are just a few of the types of coures you'll take. You will also take statistics and probability courses. As far as computer repair, this is more of a computer engineering type of discipline. A way to think of it is: computer science deals with software, the programs we run on the computers, and computer engineering deals with hardware, the physical computer itself. If you go the computer engineering route, you will take similar mathematics courses, however you will also take physics, and courses having to deal with electrical and mechanical engineering, fields that I am not too familiar with so I will leave it at that. Hope this helps!