I would like to be an expert on computer programming but at least know my way around the hardware. Is there a degree like this or is it in my best interests to dual degree seek?
Electrical Engineering seems to be what you need. Most compsci degrees never touch on hardware. Try adding some C and Assembly into an EE degree, and you would likely get what you are looking for. Add something like LISP or Python later for a very high level language, but it looks like you would benefit from learning some low level languages that interact with the hardware well. Maybe try designing some hardware of your own and writing a driver for it?
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This could be achieved by majoring in computer science, which would teach you programming, and having your minor as electrical engineering. This teaches you just about everything about electronics and hardware – including computers. Computer programming can also be self-taught, so if you can learn from books and videos, you could major in electrical engineering and just teach programming to yourself.
Good Luck!
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There are no degrees that teach extremely in-depth computer programming. A CS degree will give a good general knowledge of lost of things, but not enough about anything to do the job. Software development is generally proven through certification and not by degree. Microsoft offers many certifications to prove your competency level.
As far a learning programming in school, it is a crap shoot. Some teachers are good, but if they were that good, they would be making five of ten times as much doing contract work instead of teaching.
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Electrical Engineering seems to be what you need. Most compsci degrees never touch on hardware. Try adding some C and Assembly into an EE degree, and you would likely get what you are looking for. Add something like LISP or Python later for a very high level language, but it looks like you would benefit from learning some low level languages that interact with the hardware well. Maybe try designing some hardware of your own and writing a driver for it?
References :
The answer is that it depends on the school that you go to. A lot of the top schools are starting to realize that knowing one without the other leads to difficulties and therefore they have starting teaching both in a single major. I, for example, went to Berkeley (#1 in tech tied with MIT, w00t w00t). In the CS major, there are 3 electrical engineering classes required. There is also, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science which combines both fields into a single major. An important thing to note is the following (ididn’tt know this myself until I actually took all the classes):
Electrical Engineering: the field dealing withcircuitss as far as voltage, current, response functions, transfer functions, and so on. I.e. its largely detached from computers. There was one class which was a project class to create a memory module from scratch, another to create a chip from scratch look up micro-fabricationn). But as far as design goes,that’s computer science.
Computer Science: all knowledge that does not deal with the creation of hardware that pertains to computers. This includes design of the CPU from the essential components, design of memory and its structure, and so on.
This is my rough breakdown of the fields as they were categorized by my school. The boundary, however, is very grey depending on where you go and who you talk to.
At UCLA you might be interested in Computer Engineering which is their equivalent of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.
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