Is it necessary that you be good at mathematics for a career in software developement??
Is it necessary that you be good at mathematics for a career in software developement??
Depends on what you mean by 'good' .
It is necessary and to an extent, not negotiable, I think.
I fell that it would be useful if you are god at mathematics. If you are good at mathematics you can analyze the problems or creating easy logic for given tasks easily. you can get that analysis power
It depends on what you mean by mathematics, thats a very big subject.
English is my first language, I'm just not any good at typing\writing it, I can read and speak it just fine.
Very simply ... no. I suck at math and I've put some pretty high-end code out there over the years.Originally Posted by juice
90% of what programmers do has little or nothing to do with mathematics. By and large they are reading files, doing network communications, reading and writing files, etc. The actual math involved is mostly simple arithmetic...
The stuff about writing complex formulas and describing computer code as mathematical equations is mostly a movie trick to impress the audience.
The only area of programming where high level mathematics is essential is the scientific... and that's a very specialized career all in it's own.
Thanx commonTater. That would be motivation for me, cause I too suck at maths.
But can maths be learned with practice or is it an innate ability which could not be helped...
Math can be Lenard, some of the best minds sucked at math and then one day it just "clicked", it may just take that one teacher who clicks for you to get it.
English is my first language, I'm just not any good at typing\writing it, I can read and speak it just fine.
I would say that logic and critical reasoning is more important in programming.
Of course the thing is that people's ability in these two things are highly correlated.
There's no beating sheer determinism though!
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Advice: Take only as directed - If symptoms persist, please see your debugger
Linus Torvalds: "But it clearly is the only right way. The fact that everybody else does it some other way only means that they are wrong"
Pay attention to your studies... get a good book on C and work it page by page, example by example.
Concentrate on learning the language as your primary goal.
Computing isn't mathematics... it is sequence of events... leveraging the correct behaviors.
In about 30 years of programming -- during which I've written everything from hardware diagnostics to network based remote controls-- I've only once ran into a program where I had to translate complex formulae... and the guy who hired me was happy to sit down with me and help me work it out.
Learn C ... you'll do fine.
Thanx man. That helped. I was doing fine with my programming, solving "The C programming language" by Brian Kernighan and Dennis richie until I came across this expression
char (*(x())[])()
A function returning pointer to array[] of pointer to function retuning char.
And I just wanted to throgh my computer out of the window.
Last edited by juice; 09-24-2011 at 11:56 PM.
Oh...K&R, sometimes I think those guys are too smart for their own good.Take a look at Notes to accompany K&R. It may help with your studies.
Warning: Some or all of my posted code may be non-standard and as such should not be used and in no case looked at.
Thanx man. I'll do that
Yikes... I doubt you'll ever find something that bizarre in day to day work. Plus that little snipped is seriously broken...
y'know what... don't even try to understand everything and especially don't try to memorize all the functions... the C-99 standard library has something like a thousand functions. The Windows API has more than 30,000 ... NOBODY can remember all of that. A far better plan is to cultivate a skill for "data mining" or, as I call it, "looking stuff up" when you need to know it... A very strange thing will happen... learning it as an abstract concept doesn't sink in but when that day comes that you need it, it will suddenly make sense to you... So you use it, debug it, and then forget it till the next time you need it. On an average day of coding I probably have 3 or 4 help files, at least one website, along with my IDE and (being very old school) I often find myself flipping through books as well...
The best way to learn from a book like K&R is to work it as a deliberate study... read a page... type up the examples, compile them, break them, fix them, then once you understand them, move on to the next page. Reading retention is something like 50% wheras "doing retention" is far higher. By the time you get to the end of the book you'll be surprised at the range of problems you know how to code solutions for...
The more deliberate your study, the easier it will be...
Still need to work on those thread titles, not to mention, putting them in the right forum.
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
Still need to work on those thread titles, not to mention, putting them in the right forum.
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
