General

I hear its mostly self taught.
You take initiative to do your own projects outside of school.
The people taking CS have a good math foundation and ability to think logically through in problem solving.
If you want to prepare yourself, take the most difficult math classes, teach yourself a programming language and start building your own project whether it be an app, game, or anything.
People want to see tangible results and something to show what your experience you have and your potential.
I would suggest practice doing competitive programming contests online which will help you with programming interviews and problem solving using various algorithms. These people that are good at solving those programming problems are usually hired by top companies like google, microsoft, etc.

I hear it's hell

[quote=Amazing]Hijacking thread to ask similar question. I've never taken computer courses in University. Is there a way to learn coding without the math courses, or are those generally "needed" to a degree in that field? I feel like going to a trade school would be much more worth my time.

Edit:
I'm well aware of self-taught and online resources. I just prefer actual documentation that I can put on a resume.[/quote]
Online classes through Coursera can give you a little mini-diploma that you can put on resumes and such. A certificate to show that you completed the course.

Also, in general, CS cares a lot more about what you're capable of than what your credentials say. That's because programmers working together have their code so closely intertwined that they absolutely need to make sure that other people are on top of their games. It's quite common for interviewers to give people code questions and have them solve the problem in front of them, so the interviewer can see what the person's thought processes are like (check out the first few paragraphs of [url=http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FizzBuzzTest]this article about FizzBuzz, one such question[/url]). So if you learn something and you make an app and you publish it, that's a lot more impressive than having a fancy name on your resume.

@LampChops123 you go to umd?

I just finished my first year of college (majoring in cs) about a month ago. It was really frustrating at first, since I've had 0 prior experiences in this field, but once I understood the main concepts I started to love it. The CS courses I took freshman year was mainly just coding in java, but next year it's stuff like Data Structures and Algorithms, Database, Computer Organization, and so on, so like other said, it's not just coding. Also requires a decent size of math (at least at my school). Took Calc I and Calc II, and taking Discrete Structure classes next year. Overall, I enjoy it, but that's not something certain for everyone.

[quote=Amazing]Hijacking thread to ask similar question. I've never taken computer courses in University. Is there a way to learn coding without the math courses, or are those generally "needed" to a degree in that field? I feel like going to a trade school would be much more worth my time.

Edit:
I'm well aware of self-taught and online resources. I just prefer actual documentation that I can put on a resume.[/quote]
If all you want to do is code, taking online classes or an intro class should be enough. Trade school, pretty much.
But actual degrees tend to contain more theory and therefore math. So yes to both those questions.

OT: why don't you try looking at online courses/ocw?

I'm currently doing Bach of Science and I.T, I guess KIND-OF (notreally) in the same category? But none the less, I do a variety of I.T work which may consists of programming through to networking. I'm majoring in Inter-networking and applications so as it says.. networking is where i'm headed. I can also pick any programming units as electives/sub-majors such as programming fundamentals, programming applications, digital multimedia, gaming development/design and so on. It all depends on what you pick and how you want to structure your course.

Since I'm from Australia, I'm not sure where you're from or how your uni work but that's how my course basically goes. I find it quite fun and sometimes challenging and I don't JUST study programming, I study Web design, linux, business and such.

For your Uni, they have assumed knowledge that you know their own standard level of maths and other assumptions before you start. Not a recommend standard, but it be better if you know those assumed knowledge before you start. As what other people has mentioned, try to look over and self-study some java languages as a fundamental basis before you start. Doesn't hurt getting some early experience

Hope this helps, I'm not really on the exact line of computer science, but from the same faculty I hope my words reach out and help you! Good luck on your studies my friend!

Hijacking thread to ask similar question. I've never taken computer courses in University. Is there a way to learn coding without the math courses, or are those generally "needed" to a degree in that field? I feel like going to a trade school would be much more worth my time.

Edit:
I'm well aware of self-taught and online resources. I just prefer actual documentation that I can put on a resume.

I was in the same position as you a year ago. I chosed computer science because I wanted to be able to create apps and such. I took classes and learned alot of things, like binary numbers, logic thinking etc, apart from that I learned how to code in java and it was fun at the beginning and easy to understand, but later it got more difficult which is normal, but this got me thinking if it was really what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, my feelings told me no, so I quitted. If you like math, logic thinking, problem solving and computers then go for it.
The only thing I can say is, try it and see if it suits you, if not chose something else. What you can expect is countless hours at the computer just to figure out how to solve a small problem which could be frustrating.
I'm now going to study mechanical engineering, which was my second alternative. Think of what you really want to do in the future don't only go for the money go with your heart. Good luck! and remember spend your time wisely. You'll get what I mean when you've started to studying.

codeschool
codeacademy
treehouse

Those are two websites that are good starts. Two of them are paid services though.

HackReactor (a San Francisco based technical school) recommends doing courses from codeschool and codeacademy. They also recommend reading this:
http://eloquentjavascript.net/

glhf.

also recommend starting with Java over any other language. It's generally the most versatile and probably the most used for front end stuff.

I didn't take computer science, but I've worked together with a lot of computer science people, and I self-taught myself enough to keep up with them.

Programming is always changing. The "flavor-of-the-month" language never stays the same. A year ago, Ruby on Rails was like, THE thing. Now, who bothers with it?

So don't fixate yourself on learning a language. Computer science is about the logic, the concepts, the systems architecture, the way your code is organized. The language is a tool, but it's not the end goal. I knew people who were just 100% dedicated to Javascript, and they literally couldn't do anything that wasn't in Javascript. Needless to say, you don't want to be one of those people.

Java and Python are good places to start. Just remember, computer science is about always being flexible. Visual coding is looming on the horizon, and there's a very real possibility that it could come into full force by the time you enter university. It's so much more important to learn about if statements and function calls and parameters than it is to learn about the proper syntax to write a debug log in Python.

Math's usefulness depends on where exactly you want to go, but in general it's good to have a grasp going up to single-variable calculus. Want to work with game engines or VR, better polish up your matrices and vectors. Want to work with spreadsheets and big data, go deep into statistics. As strange as it may seem, some philosophy might not be a bad idea, because both philosophy and computer science rely on lots of logic.

Computer science is not just programming, there is also a fair bit of math involved. (It varies from field to field but good math skills help, nonetheless)
If you have no prior experience in any programming language, I would highly suggest you try to pick it up before you go to uni, because even if your university offers an introductory course, it goes by really fast. (Java and/or Python are both good languages to learn if you're new to programming.)
It's a vast field with many possibilities, which makes it interesting.