I'm in my mid 30s at the moment and have been a programmer for a long time. I finally decided to take a break and get some formal education. I've been accepted in to a university to study towards a bachelor of computer science.<p>What I want to know is if there are any books or good resources online that can give me a leg up towards things like the math or Java programming etc that are covered in a computer science degree.<p>Also, I have the option to choose a general degree or mathetics and statistics or software engineering. Would it really matter on a resume which major I chose?
I cannot really help you with good book suggestions (there are just too many, and it really depends on what your course will actually look like), but to me it sounds like you're a more practical, pragmatic programmer. In that case, I would definitely opt-in for a a software engineering degree: a lot of people who graduate CS know everything about algorithms etc, but have no clue on how to manage to build a large software application; they have no real experience with project management, etc.<p>Those are the types of things you will learn in a software engineering degree.<p>Other than that, I can tell that many, many people in software engineering get statistics wrong (because it's so incredibly counter-intuitive at times), so anyone who would have a degree in statistics on his resume would get points from me.