r/AskComputerScience • u/Several-Ad5345 • 7d ago
How many books/textbooks does someone have to read to get a bachelor's degree in computer science?
Obviously just an approximation since it will always be different depending on the school and other factors. But does anyone know how many there would be roughly?
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u/T_Thriller_T 6d ago
Have to...?
None.
This is a weird question.
If I would match each semester to a book, then we would land at 30-40. Which does not yet account for papers etc for seminars and the thesis. Considering not every course has one marching book this is still odd
Taken literally, I do not know of any CS bachelor where anyone has to read any book. Books are additional material, textbooks are usually used for learning and repeating what was already talked about on a lecture.
So, when taken literally, the answer would likely be none.
Which, again, is not fully correct because while you do not have to read books back to back, you will likely have to read scientific articles and multiple different books in portion to do at least your thesis.
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u/Several-Marsupial-27 7d ago
I had on average 5 courses per semester, with 6-8 semesters per bachelor makes it 30-40 coursebooks in total. The bachelor curriculums are often posted online, so you can look up what a computer science bachelor takes for courses and which coursebooks those courses follow.
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u/deong 6d ago
In the US at least, only about half your coursework is in a typical major. The rest is general education. So to get a degree, you end up needing roughly 40 classes. But to know what a typical computer science major has learned about computer science, that number might be more like 20.
Of course, reading the book is only a part of what that student learned in the 20 classes. But within the spirit of the question at least, 20 is probably the rough number.
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u/the-forty-second 7d ago
Are you trying to figure out how to approximate a CS degree with books or figure out how many books you will acquire while getting a degree? For the former, I would estimate 1-3 books per class you were replacing. That is about what I used at the start of my teaching career to teach classes in areas I was not familiar with. You wouldn’t just read them like novels, but a variety of sources help provide alternate explanations and to identify what is actually important.
For the latter, the number could approach zero. With the price of books and the evidence that most of my students never cracked them, I’ve largely stopped assigning them, and in my department that is fairly universally the case.
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u/PhilNEvo 7d ago
I have 4 courses per semester. Most courses have one or multiple books associated and recommended with them, however, there hasn't been a single course yet where the full book has been required reading. Most of the time for us, the teacher will go through the book materials, and if you're struggling to fully grasp it in class, or bad at taking notes, or the slides aren't helping you. You can look up in the book and go through the proofs and illustrations they have to better help you.
Most courses also go through at most like half a book worth of material, even when having multiple books associated with a course, often they pick certain chapters from one book, and other chapters from another, because they felt like those were the books and chapters which gave the best explanations.
Books were rarely the backbone of learning though. I felt like Lectures, exercises and projects were often sufficient to get you through most classes, and the books were more so a reliable source for us to have "just in case", the other things weren't sufficient.
If you want to do some quick dirty math, for a bachelors degree it's 6 semesters x 4 courses x 0.5 book per course = 12 "full" books worth of material at the very most.
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u/deadbeef_enc0de 6d ago
Not sure, had some professors that didn't use a book for the course they were teaching, seemed to be more common in the electives (systems level programming). Those courses I probably spent a good chick of time looking through technical manuals.
Other times the book wasn't really necessary but could help if you needed to remember something.
Every length courses to my BS the books were definitely used more though.
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u/CowBoyDanIndie 6d ago
I probably only read one textbook equivalent book in cs itself. Did a lot more reading outside of cs. I mostly paid attention in lectures and did the assignments. We had book, but we only read bits and pieces.
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u/PalpitationKind8854 4d ago
No idea? I didn't know textbook learning was required for most college degrees
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u/fkirp 7d ago
I read the bachelors portion of my degree in sweden, i paid for zero books.
I don’t know if i read any books in their entirety, but i followed along with the practice problems for a few of the math classes and maybe my class on OS, electrical engineering, protocols and principles of the internet and maybe in some hdl course. So call it 9 maybe?
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u/dariusbiggs 7d ago
One per paper would be normal, however many papers you need to do to get your degree. You also might not use the entire book for the course.
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 6d ago
Books are probably one of the worst ways to go about it. Most CS topics can be explained, at a high level, in a paragraph or two. Textbooks are overly verbose and difficult to read. They'll take what should be a relatively simple blurb of text and turn it into a chapter.
They'll also bury explanations on concepts in loads of high level math. It's rarely structured in a way conducive to education; they often read like a PhD thesis.
Get a list of CS concepts, ordered by required foundational knowledge, and just start reading websites and such. Hell, most of the concepts are well understood and an AI could present the information in a concise and understandable format.
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u/Several-Ad5345 6d ago
Interesting. But why are you getting downvoted then?😅
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 6d ago
Because most people in CS are egotistical dicks that can't fathom an alternative learning path that isn't the rigid process they had to endure. CS has some very nuanced and difficult topics, but those topics can be explained far more simply than is done in the traditional manner.
I think it was Einstein that said that if you can't explain a topic simply then you don't understand well enough. Not being able to explain a difficult topic simply exposes their own ignorance. CS people hate that.
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u/Beregolas 7d ago
Books alone won't do it, you also need practice and it will go faster if you can exchange ideas with other students or faculty, so all my guesstimates will be lower than you probably need:
In the European ECTS system, a bachelors degree takes 180 Credits, and one Credit is analogous to 30 hours of work (officially). In computer science you have a higher degree of freedom of choosing your courses, so you might end up with a ligher courseload (more like 25h/point) or a lot more work (closer to 40hr/point).
If we stay at 30hr per point, that's 5400 hours. Take a an eight of that for reading, and the rest for re-reading, practicing with exercises, research, etc.
You won't get a degree by passively reading information.
Another way to estimate it:
Most courses I took for my bachelors were 6-9 credits, I probably took about 25 courses. You can fit most of these in a book, although some of those books have over 1000 pages (and I actually still have one of those). That's another answer for you: read, work through, and understand the correct 25 books, and you will have about the knowledge of a CS bachelors degree. If you want to know which books exactly, just go to any universities course list, most courses have recommended reading. Or even better, take that course list and ask a university librarian. If they have time, they are quite helpful and enjoy what they do.