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can you help me?

B

BadOmen

Senior member
Please hear a sad story and help me to find a happy ending for it.🙂

I got my degree in Computer Sciences 12 years ago. By that time, I also became Visual Basic MCP (I think VB was around version 5). But I stopped programming in 2000, and after that I could neither find a job in programming nor afford courses to keep me up to date.

Now I think I can pay for a course, nothing fancy, and try to get back in business. I'm basically between two courses I saw on a local college: Visual Basic .NET (as my whole programming life back then was dedicated to VB) or another one called Internet Scripting Languages.

The latter sounds a little too generic for me, as they say it covers Javascript, ccs, html and vbscript, among others. What made me consider it was the fact that it could have more practical day-to-day usefulness, as I still do some freelance web development (right now based mostly on my precious skills with graphic tools).

So, my question for you, invaluable friends, is: based on what you know about the job market and what I told you about me, which course do you think I could benefit more from in order to get back to work?

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.
Thank you immensely
 
If you want to get back into a corporate development job then the VB.NET Class is the one to take. If you are still planning on doing freelance work, just with a wider scope then your current freelance work, then it sounds like the web scripting is the one to take. That will at least get you familiar with writing web applications. Since you have a background in CS already it shouldn't be too hard to pick up a new language, so even if the class introduces stuff like php or perl as a web scripting language it should only help you.
 
You definately want to take the VB.NET course. The scipting language course may be useful for opening doors, but not nearly as much as the one in .NET.

VB.NET (and even C#, for that matter) is pretty trivial to learn for someone with a CS degree. It's the runtime library that's *HUGE* and will consume most of your time.

Here's a link to one of the best .NET books I've found. It's getting a little old, but I still use it as a reference and was invaluable while learning .NET. Once you start getting into .NET, you'll have all kinds of questions like "What's the difference between a collection and a hastable and when do I want to use one over the other?" This book was great for that kind of stuff.

Dave
 
Both are valid points indeed, and you cannot imagine how thankful I am for your input.

By reading the course descriptions for the 10th time yesterday, I started thinking about one more thing: the scripting languages course has, as prerequisite, "intermediate Windows skills". Well, programming may not be the monster most people think it is, but it's not something that you can jump into with intermediate Windows skills either. That got me a little suspicious about this course, thinking whether it wouldn't be absurdely basic.

The VB.NET, on the other hand, asks for object-oriented knowledge, among other prerequisites. By the time I worked with VB, it was mostly procedural, starting a (very slow) transition. I saw most object-oriented programming concepts at school only.

Now that's an uncomfortable position.
 
Originally posted by: BadOmen
Both are valid points indeed, and you cannot imagine how thankful I am for your input.

By reading the course descriptions for the 10th time yesterday, I started thinking about one more thing: the scripting languages course has, as prerequisite, "intermediate Windows skills". Well, programming may not be the monster most people think it is, but it's not something that you can jump into with intermediate Windows skills either. That got me a little suspicious about this course, thinking whether it wouldn't be absurdely basic.

The VB.NET, on the other hand, asks for object-oriented knowledge, among other prerequisites. By the time I worked with VB, it was mostly procedural, starting a (very slow) transition. I saw most object-oriented programming concepts at school only.

Now that's an uncomfortable position.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't worry about that too much. Like Apathetic said, since you are already familiar with VB the hardest part will be learning the .NET Framework.

Also, with the updated description it sounds like the web scripting class would be pretty useless.

 
When you did VB programming, did you ever use COM objects? In other words, does this syntax look familiar?

Dim oSomething as SomeObject

Set oSomething = New SomeObject()
oSomething.SomeProperty = SomeValue
oSomething.DoSomething()
Set oSomething = Nothing

If so, I don't think you have too much to worry about because you're used to instantiating objects, setting properties, releasing them when you're finished, etc. While VB6 wasn't an object oriented language, it was "object based" and should be good enough to get you started.

Dave
 
The syntax looks very familiar. I didn't remember the name "COM objects", but that thing with instancing, properties and methods, yes, that's totally ok. So, it seems I can face it.

I initially considered the other course mostly because I would love to know something like php, something highly usable for the web, but I doubt that one is gonna cover it. I've found a php/mysql course, but the university asks for Javascript and ccs as prerequisites, two things I am not familiar with.

 
Microsoft has released a couple different free versions of Visual Studio. You can get the Visual Basic one here

I've never used it (I use the full version at work), but a couple of people here at work have downloaded it and play around with it at home.

Sounds like it's time for you to download it and start playing around with it.

Dave
 
Definitely. I need a new Visual Studio for sure.

I went to an orientation session at the college yesterday, and the guy said something actually funny, coming from the course coordinator:

"You know, the market for programming is not picking up. Everything today is around networks".
 
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