My 2 cents: The author presumably goes to Princeton - the ivy league is in general a tough place to "start learning" things, especially STEM. Few of the staff would teach you the basics of anything, mostly because you are attending a research college, where teaching is the professors' side gig.
I went to an ivy league school, and a large portion of the people in the CS program did competitive programming/knew number theory and discrete math from high school etc. All the problems we got as homework were really intense - I'd consistently do more than 60-70 hours of studying outside of classes to keep up. Mind you, for me CS was/is like crack - I feel like I'd have put in even more time if I didn't need to sleep or want to hang out with my friends.
There are some intro classes, of course, but the quality of those varies a lot.
Edit: I don't mean to discourage people with this post. I was actually one of the few people who didn't have much of a CS/quanty background in my CS classes. My advisor told me to have a backup major in case I fail the tougher required classes, but I made it through.
I went to an ivy league school, and a large portion of the people in the CS program did competitive programming/knew number theory and discrete math from high school etc. All the problems we got as homework were really intense - I'd consistently do more than 60-70 hours of studying outside of classes to keep up. Mind you, for me CS was/is like crack - I feel like I'd have put in even more time if I didn't need to sleep or want to hang out with my friends.
There are some intro classes, of course, but the quality of those varies a lot.
Edit: I don't mean to discourage people with this post. I was actually one of the few people who didn't have much of a CS/quanty background in my CS classes. My advisor told me to have a backup major in case I fail the tougher required classes, but I made it through.