Diving Headfirst into a CS major

[evan]

So after messing around for 2 years thinking I'm 100% pre-business (you have to apply to the undergrad business school 2nd year at my school) I've decided to abandon that for Computer Science. Thus far I have taken CS 101 and then this spring I TAed it. That's the summary of my experience thus far. In the fall I'll be jumping in completely with more CS classes and in the spring I'll start using languages other than Java (mostly C++).

I have just gotten a new Macbook Pro with which I will take on the next 2 years of intense computer sciencing and this summer I want to start learning things other than Java. iPhone development/Objective C, C, C++, ruby, HTML/CSS... whatever. I plan on dabbling in a bunch of stuff and whatever I find most interesting/what I grasp the quickest I'll pursue the rest of the summer.

Basically my question for the community is... what would be a good starting point for me considering all I really know is java? I've started looking through the stanford iTunes U stuff for iPhone but not knowing C makes that kinda difficult... Recommend any good websites with tutorials or maybe even books? Should I install Linux? What distro would be best/easiest to get running smoothly on my macbook? What other advice do you have? I know this is kinda broad but that's sorta the point... I know a lot of people here are learned in the ways of programming, what wisdom can you impart?

[Ryan]

You could try a couple of Linux distros using Virtualbox. It performs the same task as Parallels but it's open-source and free. I'm partial to Arch Linux. Definitely not a newbie distro, but if you're gonna jump in headfirst...

If you just follow the instructions on their wiki you'll have it up and running pretty quickly. Most stuff you have to do on your own (it doesn't even come with a GUI), but their website has instructions for most common tasks.

I run Arch and Windows XP in Virtualbox for my computer science classes.

[Partial]

I can do anything that needs to be done for school in Mac OS. I would stick with that, but use the command line when you have an opportunity to learn something.

[Ryan]

I can do anything that needs to be done for school in Mac OS. I would stick with that, but use the command line when you have an opportunity to learn something.

But once you start getting into more complicated projects like this (http://cs.trinity.edu/~mlewis/CSCI3394-F07/project.html) its important to test on a similar platform. For me this always means a trip up to a lab (we use Fedora), but I can at least do some testing in a VM.