How can I prepare for an introductory CS college course? I am currently in Grade

Question

How can I prepare for an introductory CS college course?

I am currently in Grade 12 and next year I will be studying Computer Science at a university in South Africa (syllabus is here). However CS has a very high dropout rate here in South Africa, more than any other course, and I'm nervous because of that. My experience with programming is limited to Java in the Net beans environment. I understand the basics of programming (loops, arrays, methods and classes, reading and understanding other languages, etc).

My question is how can I be more prepared? I'm willing to learn new languages or take online courses or anything that can help me next year.

Explanation / Answer

A lot of the other answers seem to be pointing in the right direction and get to the gist of things. I will give you a more pointed and concrete answer since I think it will be useful.

In my opinion, you are best served learning a bit of discrete maths and logic. The courses in the syllabus appear to either assume you know it or might skim over it when needed. A lot of CS students have a hard time with these topics. I have seen a good number of "elite" programmers entering university that hit a wall, here. On the other hand, I have seen others sail right through without an issue. I don't know anything about the high dropout rate in CS within South Africa, but difficulty getting past the discrete maths material does weed people out.

The primary goal is to learn how to think analytically and problem solve. I think this material is one of the best approaches to going about this.

Checklist of Topics:

Combinatorics (Counting principles)
Formal Logic (aka Boolean Logic)
Basic Set Theory/Algebra
Theorems and Proofs (Proofs by contradiction, Proofs by induction)
Graph Theory

Since your goal is preparation, you probably only need to focus on the basics. By this, I mean focus specifically on the easy, introductory material. You're looking for a strong conceptual framework concerning how to think.

Materials:

Textbook: Discrete Mathematics Lecture Notes This is just a decent set of lecture notes I found online. Googling around might help you find others.

Video Lectures for Discrete Maths: Are there any good Discrete Mathematics video online? (I really like the Arsdigita stuff)

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