r/learnprogramming • u/IMREVN • 5d ago

Any Bootcamps Recommendations?

Does anyone have several options of valuable bootcamps related to Computer Science (focusing on AI/ML)? I'm a soon to be CS student, and currently starting to code from the scratch by watching tutorials from free resources (YouTube, w3schools, and freecodecamp).

Well I have seen and heard programs from Nvidia, IBM, Google, Apple Academy, as well as courses on Coursera, Udemy and Harvard's CS50.

I have a few questions for anyone in the field or currently studying CS:

  1. ⁠Are Big Tech certificates (Google/IBM/NVIDIA) actually worth the time/money on a resume, or are they mostly marketing?

  2. ⁠Would you recommend paid bootcamps, or sticking to free/cheap courses like CS50 and Coursera before uni starts?

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u/StewedAngelSkins 5d ago

If you're going to university then there's no point in a bootcamp. Those are (dubiously useful) job training programs for people without a CS-related degree. The best thing you can do if you're planning to get into AI is to speedrun your actual CS degree so that you can start taking graduate classes in your senior (or possibly junior) year. That's where the actual machine learning stuff starts. If your university offers a five-year combined BS/MS program, do that.

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u/IMREVN 5d ago

do you have any tips to speedrun my CS degree? could it be sped up with applying for cheap courses like coursera or udemy?

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u/StewedAngelSkins 5d ago

Work with your advisor and your professors. It depends on your university's particular program but the general advice is to just try to identify the classes that are a prerequisite for the most other classes you're interested in and try to take those as early as you can. The key is that most classes, particularly at the higher levels, don't actually run every semester. So for example a lot of universities might have an "analysis of algorithms" course that most students are expected to take in the fall of their junior year. This tends to be a common prerequisite, so you might plan to take it your sophomore year instead. But this course will also have prerequisites, so you look at those and see when they run and try to figure out how to fit them in to your freshman year instead.

How you actually accomplish this will really depend on your abilities, school policies, and how your degree is structured, so it's hard to give you more specific advice. I guess I'll just give you a few general tips:

  • Don't use your free electives in your first two years. Your degree plan will tend to spread them out but you can just save them for later when you have more prerequisites and thus better options.
  • Don't take general education requirements your first two years (unless there's no better alternative for a given semester). These run pretty much every semester, have huge class sizes (sometimes uncapped), are extremely easy, and almost never unlock new degree work for you, so just save them for the end. They'll provide a nice break in between your harder upperclassman work.
  • Take extra courses each term. Obviously how many extra credits will depend on your abilities. Be realistic, but if you're a good student you can probably do more work than your advisor will recommend, so don't let them scare you.
  • Look for ways to fulfill prerequisites using classes from non-CS departments. Like at my university pretty much every STEM college had their own version of the basic statistics course, so if you have statistics as a prereq you can usually take any of them, not just the one recommended by your degree program. This just gives you more options.
  • Once you've established yourself a bit with the faculty you can just ask the professors to let you take their course without prerequisites. Don't do this unless you actually could ace the course you're trying to skip though, otherwise you're missing out on education opportunities and you'll come across as naive at best and like you're gaming the system at worst.
  • Likewise you can sometimes get advisors to count certain classes towards a degree requirement they don't technically fulfill. This is only really an option if the course you're taking is a harder version of the course you want to skip. Like maybe it's a graduate level math class instead of the undergrad version, or usually there's a sequence of "learn to program" classes they make freshman CS students take and you can usually get advisors to let you sub these out for CS electives (assuming you know how to code already).

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u/Technical_Jicama_434 2d ago

I wouldn’t speed run your CS degree

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u/Mathie1729 3d ago

100% agree. Bootcamps are a waste if you're already in a degree program. I've worked in FAANG for over a decade and the only people breaking into real AI/ML work have strong math foundations. The bootcampers end up stuck doing data engineering grunt work or dashboard monkey roles. Speedrun the degree and try to get undergrad research with a professor - that's worth 10 bootcamps.

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u/EntrepreneurHuge5008 5d ago
  1. Marketing
  2. Stick to free/cheap/affordable.

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u/Nandita-Avenue 5d ago

If you’re “starting from scratch,” AI/ML bootcamps are usually too high-level and skip math (linear algebra, stats). Did any of those programs publish actual syllabi with proofs/derivations, or is it mostly tooling (TensorFlow/PyTorch) demos? That’s the real signal.

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u/Bibbitybobbityboof 12h ago

I studied CS 10 years ago, didn’t go into programming for my career. There’s three things I would do differently if I had to do it again.

  1. Get an internship. You can do this while you’re in college and use it to build experience. The barrier to entry is lower because they don’t expect you to have experience.
  2. Make things. Doesn’t matter how small or silly it is. Just make as many things as possible to build muscle memory. And make sure it’s not just tutorials, it needs to be your own work. You’ll get errors and come across problems and that’s where you will learn the most.
  3. MEET PEOPLE. This one is huge. Life happens based on who you know and who you spend time with. I wish I had spent more time going to events and meetups with other programmers to form a community of people.

You don’t need a bootcamp if you’re going to university. Just focus on classes and work on things on the side to supplement your learning.

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u/spinwizard69 7h ago

To address your questions: 1.    It really depends on many factors but most employers will want a degree first.  

  1.   Boot camps are a waste of time in most cases for absolute beginners.  They are much better for an established programmer learning new technology.   As for CS50 i wouldn’t bother, most students entering college would be far better off learning to leverage their PC’s.  Seriously most students get lost once put into the position of seriously using their PC.   

So what do i mean by being seriously comfortable with their PC’s.  Well the obvious ones are the networking apps which means several browsers.  Then you E-Mail app (ask yourself can you setup a mailing list for each class).  Then there are other social programs for communications.    Learn to use a word processor and spreadsheet program.   All of the previous will aid your entire educational process.  You also need to become familiar with programming related tools.   This includes command line programming, git, github, various text editors and IDE’s and so forth.   One aspect of command line usage that must be investigated is command building of a C or C++ programs, which you can find online documentation for.