NSS Software Engineering Prerequisites

Welcome to the Nashville Software School Software Engineering Program. On this site, you’ll find all the information you need regarding the prerequisites for the Software Engineering with Java/AWS Specialization course.

Prerequisites must be completed prior to beginning the nine month, instructor-led course.

Prerequisites

The prerequisites are broken into two parts:

Four online, self-directed courses
A technical assessment

The first course is an introduction to Java created and offered by Team Treehouse. The second and third courses were created by Duke University and are hosted on Coursera. The fourth course was originally created by Amazon Technical Academy (ATA) and modified by Nashville Software School (NSS). It is contained within this website.

NOTE: If you have previous Java programming experience you may be familiar with some of the material in these courses. We don’t wish to bore you or waste your time, so it’s ok to move quickly through the courses. However, you should not skip past anything unless you are completely confident you understand it. Remember, there’s nothing wrong with a refresher. Also, the fourth course is a good introduction to the instructional approach of the immersive program.

After completing the prerequisite courses, you must also pass a required technical assessment prior to enrollment in the immersive course.

NOTE: We realize a technical assessment might sound daunting to someone just starting their journey to becoming a software developer, but don’t worry. The material covered in the prerequisite courses will be enough to prepare you.

We want you to succeed.

Getting Help

We get it. Computers are strange animals and learning how to program is hard. If you’re feeling stuck on something, chances are someone else has been stuck in the same spot. We have outlined several other resources and specific solutions in the Help! section of this site.

Asking Questions

When the Help! section isn’t quite enough, we have a couple of options you can use to ask questions.

As part of the admissions process you should have been granted access to a Slack organization. Slack is a chat tool commonly used by software developers to collaborate on coding projects (and to share memes). Course instructors regularly monitor Slack and can offer assistance there.

In addition to slack for Courses 1-3 the Coursera Discussion Forums are a great resource for working through any questions you may have about the content in those courses. (Since Course 4 is not offered on the Coursera platform there is no discussion forum for it.)

Ready to get started?

Jump into Course 1, and work your way through the others from there: