this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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In my CS degree I would have only learned and used java if not for my optional data science courses, a single class on machine language, a single SQL course, and a c++ course at community college before going to uni.
My data science courses introduced me to matlab, bash, r, Julia, python, machine learning, docker, Linux, and aws. My uni didn't even have a data science degree, those courses primarily counted towards my math minor since they were under statistics.
The one piece of advice I still give to every CS student I meet is to diversify your classes whenever possible, don't just stick to the core comp sci classes and take throwaway electives
Absolutely.
I don’t have a CS degree, I have a Cybersecurity and Forensics one. But, I love programming, and between the overlap of the two degrees and and my advanced designation I ended up taking about 3/4ths of the classes needed to get a CS degree.
Diversifying helped so much with me becoming a well rounded developer. My assembly programming class, while optional for CS, was mandatory for me, made me a significantly better dev. That assembly knowledge got me to become a skilled debugger, which made my C++ classes 10x easier, and it helped me understand memory at a lower level, making the memory problems easier to diagnose and fix.
I convinced a CS friend to take one of my cyber classes, Reverse Engineering, and he found te components of the class where we analyzed a vulnerable program to find and exploit the vuln, or the bit where we tried and determined the bug based on malware that exploited it is insightful to learning to program securely.
Learning about the infrastructure used in enterprise during a Windows admin or Linux admin class will make it easier to write code for those systems.
From the cybersecurity perspective, many of my CS classes carry me hard. Knowing how programs are written, how APIs are developed, and how to design complex software lets me make more educated recommendations based on what little information I’m given by the limited logs I am given to investigate. Writing code that interfaces with linux primitives makes it easier to conceptualize what’s going on when I am debugging a broken linux system.
Interesting, in my degree we had one lesson in Java for OOP (the rest of the course was C++), Java for android programming, Python in another course, and everything else from year 1 to year 4 (that had programming) was in C/C++. Except for assembly in computer architecture.