What Courses Should I Take to Launch a Career in Mobile Computing?

mobile computingOne of the fastest-growing industries is mobile computing, and starting a career in this field is closely related to working in Web design. The programming frameworks used in mobile technology work in a similar way to Web programming frameworks, such as Django and Ruby on Rails. To get started in mobile software development, you don’t really need a four-year degree, but you do need to know some important programming concepts fairly well.

Getting Started in Application Development

Several introductory computer science courses are all that are required to develop Android or iOS apps, but if you want to get hired by a company as a developer, you will need at least an associate’s degree in Web design. It’s really a good idea to go ahead and get a two-year degree because the job market for developers is extremely crowded in the freelance area. If you’re thinking of launching a freelance career, you will be much better off working in the industry for a few years before trying to make it on your own as a freelancer.

By completing at least a two-year degree and working for a software maker for a few years, you will have much more experience and many more connections to rely on when looking for freelance work. If you simply start bidding on jobs without first earning a degree, you will be competing with thousands of other programmers from all over the world who can often afford to bid much lower amounts on jobs because of the lower cost of living in other countries.

The Courses You Should Take

The specific courses you should take are introductory computer science courses as well as data structures and algorithms courses. These introductory classes teach you about object-oriented programming, which is a fundamental programming skill that is used in Web and mobile application design. When you take data structures and algorithms courses, you will probably have to take some prerequisites before you’re able to enroll in the second- or third-year courses. Data structures and algorithms parts one and two are indispensable theory courses that teach you the fundamentals of designing efficient software. You don’t need to be an algorithm specialist to design mobile applications, but you absolutely must know when to choose a linked list, hash map, array or binary search tree when designing a program. You also need to understand the most efficient algorithms to use for searching and sorting the various data structures, such as graphs, queues and dequeues.

Another important course is computer architecture because it focuses on number systems, such as binary, octal and hexadecimal, and it teaches you about how software and hardware work together at the operating system level. It’s not necessary to go any further than the second year of a computer science degree if you only want to do mobile development, and you can simply get a two-year Web design degree instead.

Mobile app development is one of the best careers to go into in terms of the cost of education compared to the salary you can make. If you have a strong ability to focus and a knack for technical problem solving, consider going into mobile computing.

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