I had been programming for around 15 years before starting my degree. Started with a good old 48k speccy. I think it helped a lot. I don't think any of the concepts at degree level were completly new to me whilst others on my course seemed to think there was some kind of VooDoo going on every time a new concept was introduced.

Did you have previous prgramming experience before starting college? If, so how much did it help? Would you have gotten the degree without the previous experience?

Yes. I also started programming with BASIC at the age of 6.

Before going to the university, I also studied CS at school, and self-taught - by reading books - various programming languages (C, C++, Pascal and so on) .

I would have gotten my degree even without the previous experience, but it did help a lot. Especially in the basic courses.

I should add to my previous comment that although it did give me some kind of advantage, there were people on my degree who had never touched a programming language before they started who just naturally grasped the programming concepts.

1) Yeah, I'd been using BASIC for a while, and had some of the C++ fundamentals down before starting university

2) I was able to breeze through most of the programming courses in my first year

3) Yes, but the experience did help

I'm still doing my degree but:

1) Barely. The only "programming" experience I had was a simple add/remove item script for TES 4 Oblivion.

2) How much that script helped me? I'd say about nothing. As for if that hindered my learning in any way. I'd say that learning to code wasn't difficult, I enjoy it. I had more troubles with non-programming courses (damn you mathematics! though I learned a lot after I did Algebra and Mathematical Analysis courses again :) ). Still, most of the programming is made in your own time.

Thing is, programming, before going to uni, was this arcane thing that seemed impossible. First, I had absolutely no idea where begin. Compiler? Source code? Never heard of them. Second, it seemed an impossible task. I was amazed by some of the scripting Oblivion's modders did.

Once I got my feet wet in uni, learning the basics properly (aka, this is an algorithm, this is a control structure, etc) it sunk it and I began to understand much better what programming was. Now I'm in my third year (actually fourth, as I said, had to do some courses again) and learning a lot, and I like it. Pretty happy with this "coding" stuff :)

3) It would have made 0 difference. As I mentioned, I already had no idea about programming.

I had some friends go in it on pretty much ground zero and graduate just fine. I had been programming since I was old enough to know how to type on a keyboard.. which kind of made me a class tutor of sorts. But don't fret too much.. one of the things a CS degree teaches you is the importance of being able to stick with tough challenges until they are solved. I will admit though that most of the hardest programming challenges I tackled in college were self-inflicted and a result of finding cool outside projects to do with friends. Oh, and my CS degree is from Penn State University for reference.

It's funny how some of you have been around so damn long that you've managed to go from wet behind the ears beginners to industry professionals.. what a difference 14 years makes. lol

Yes, since I was 8 years old I had programmed in Basic. It helped me a lot during the first year of the course, especially on the logic, data structures and algorithm classes.

The previous programming experience has helped me to focus myself on the theoretical side of things and had given me knowledge to debate with me teachers, which was something that someone without any kind of experience couldn't do. But still, I would have gotten the degree even without prior experience and I´ve know many good programmers that had gotten into uni without any kind of programming experience.

(1)Did you have previous programming experience before starting college?

(2)If, so how much did it help?

(3)Would you have gotten the degree without the previous experience?

1: Yes, tried teaching myself various languages on and off starting a few years before going in for the degree

2: It made the first half of a few courses' coursework quick and easy, but quickly highlighted ways I had mis-trained myself. Bad practices from shoddy tutorials, hubris that needed to be scoured away, adhering to certain languages out of favoritism...one of the best things I learned in the program was how to pick up new languages and be open to new paradigms and styles.

Also, personal research made me familiar with a lot of varied concepts that cropped up in electives and random scenarios throughout the degree. This is just another reason why "just doing the coursework" with no side projects or personal interests will make you a mediocre programmer at best.

3: If you mean "would I have survived/passed my classes" then yes. Most college undergrad programs assume their students know absolutely nothing coming in, and there are plenty of resources to help you through. I'm objectively on the more-intelligent end of the human spectrum (not genius, just clever) so that helped me too. If you pick things up quickly, take that as an extra boost for your confidence in making it through.

If you mean "would I have even decided to go into CS if I hadn't done programming before-hand" I'd say probably not. My self instruction attempts told me it was something I was interested in, but bad at teaching myself with no foundating. I wanted to get the formal education environment to really succeed at learning it.

Interestingly, I took an elective as a freshman in high school where we did programming in Turbo Pascal, and I hated it then. I came back to programming about 8 years later when I got interested in gamedev, and that was the "prior programming" that eventually got me to get the degree.

I had about five years of experience going in. It was a large help in my first two years, and fell off sharply after that. It's been almost zero advantage in graduate studies, which have a lot of math and not very much programming.

I started learning BASIC from my dad when I was around 5-6 years old. During high school I started "teaching" myself C and the very simplest parts of C++ (classes and virtual methods). My final year of high school I learned some x86 assembly. I was able to test through a lot of college, but not quite as much as frob did.

Previous experience helped immensely. Most of my first two years were very easy, but I still picked up new details that I hadn't learned before. The remainig two years were much more advanced and much more interesting because the material was all new (databases, networks, operating system architecture, parser and compiler theory, distributed components, etc).

Skipping courses at my college was kind of a bad idea though since we weren't allowed to fill "core requirements" with classes categorized as "elective", so I had to take dull differential equations instead of something fun.