[clug] Education options

Francis James Whittle fudje at phreaker.net
Thu Jan 22 04:03:27 GMT 2004


On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 20:41, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> On 20 Jan 2004, at 09:56, Mark Harrison wrote:
> 
> > The course options so far seem to be:
> > a) Spherion (Advanced diploma of business systems)
> 
> IMHO, not worth the $15,000 *or* the piece of paper it's printed on.
> 
> > b) TAFE (Diploma in IT - software development)
> 
> Best bet right there.
> 
> > c) UC (Graduate Diploma in IT - software engineering)
> 
> Didn't you say you wanted to *avoid* Windows?
> 
> These guys sold their souls to Microsoft years ago - when I was 
> graduating, they were converting the last of their Linux labs to 
> Windows.
> 
> Perhaps they've had a severe change of heart in the meantime, but you 
> might want to just walk through Building 11 (Information Sciences and 
> Engineering) and check what the lab machines are running these days.

Last I heard, last year, they could be basically referred to as
"University of Microsoft, Canberra Campus" - My sister's ex-boyfriend
was studying there.

> > So, are there other options that I have missed?
> 
> Grab a book like "Dummies Guide To Perl" and learn a language. After 
> that, grab "The C Programming Language" by Kernigan and Ritchie 
> (preferably an edition that's been updated for ANSI C) and learn a 
> "real" language.
> 
> Then grab a book on data structures and algorithms, and work through 
> the exercises.

The best book I've found on data structures was - Kernighan & Ritchie. 
Although I didn't understand the data structures parts the first time
through - but it does teach you about the true power of the things that
Mr Bertrand "Let's design a slow, redundant, and horrible language, and
name it after a revolutionary structure in Paris" Meyer refers to as
quirks in C; eventually you understand.  Must get the ANSI edition some
day, unfortunately I don't currently have $150 lying around....

> By this stage, you're at least qualified enough to replace an Indian 
> programmer, but apparently IBM GSA and Telstra don't understand that.

Depends who you ask.  A lot of people are being told to "hold tight" and
expect to have a big job shortly, because cleaning up after India is
going to take a lot of work.

> Once you have a modicum of understanding of C and Perl, start applying 
> for jobs. In the meantime, pick up an open source package that you have 
> been a user of for so long, and try to figure out what you'll need to 
> do to add your most-wanted feature!
> 
> Regards
> Alex Satrapa
> 
> "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to 
> choose from"
>      -- Andrew Tanenbaum
-- 
Francis James Whittle
BSEng Student,
Australian National University
Canberra, Australia



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