worthwhile learning?

[Developwebsites]

Taking into account my time, tuition, book prices, lab fees, etc.
are these courses better to learn in a class, As far as real hands-on practice
goes, or which ones are easy enough to learn on my own.
Javascript, CSS, Perl, ASP.net, PHP, CGI, Access.

I do need to register for a min of 12cr, so maybe taking UNIX, TCP/IP, VB.net,
VC++, SQL, IIS, etc. and some other stuff I cant practice at home would be
better.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

Taking into account my time, tuition, book prices, lab fees, etc.
are these courses better to learn in a class, As far as real hands-on practice
goes, or which ones are easy enough to learn on my own.
Javascript, CSS, Perl, ASP.net, PHP, CGI, Access.

You should be able to learn any of the above yourself.

However with most things in general you can learn how to do them by
yourself, but you usually need human feedback to learn how to do them
*well*!

For example, in CSS:

body { color: black; }
h1 { color: black; }
h2 { color: black; }
h3 { color: black; }
h4 { color: black; }
h5 { color: black; }
h6 { color: black; }
p { color: black; }

will "work", but an expert will point out that "body {color: black;}" on
its own would have probably been enough, and that you should specify a
background colour too!

I do need to register for a min of 12cr, so maybe taking UNIX, TCP/IP,
VB.net, VC++, SQL, IIS, etc. and some other stuff I cant practice at
home would be better.

Certainly you can learn most of this stuff at home. When I was a student
(many moons ago) a Microsoft Visual Studio student licence cost about
£100 (not too much) and that would be enough to let you practise VB.net
and VC++.

And then add a Linux partition to your computer (sometimes a learning
experience in itself!) and practise the basics of UNIX system
administration, set up an Apache web server and a MySQL or PostgreSQL
database and practise your PHP, Perl, CGI and SQL.

TCP/IP is probably not something you want to learn by yourself. It's a bit
of a rat's nest.

 

[Sid Ismail]

On 23 Nov 2003 17:24:37 GMT, (e-mail address removed) (Developwebsites)
wrote:

: Taking into account my time, tuition, book prices, lab fees, etc.
: are these courses better to learn in a class, As far as real hands-on practice
: goes, or which ones are easy enough to learn on my own.
: Javascript, CSS, Perl, ASP.net, PHP, CGI, Access.


Only if the instructress is 38-24-36.

Sid

 

[Eric Bohlman]

(e-mail address removed) (Developwebsites) wrote in

Taking into account my time, tuition, book prices, lab fees, etc.
are these courses better to learn in a class, As far as real hands-on
practice goes, or which ones are easy enough to learn on my own.
Javascript, CSS, Perl, ASP.net, PHP, CGI, Access.

I do need to register for a min of 12cr, so maybe taking UNIX, TCP/IP,
VB.net, VC++, SQL, IIS, etc. and some other stuff I cant practice at
home would be better.

That will depend on how much programming and database experience you have.
If, for example, you know any programming language, then Javascript, Perl,
ASP, and PHP should be fairly easy to pick up on your own. CGI by itself
is too small a topic to warrant a course of its own; it's just a spec for
how web servers should talk to external programs, so most of such a course
is really going to be dealing with whatever programming language the
instructor likes best for CGI work.

Access should also be pretty easy to pick up, but if your main interest is
server-side Web work, it's not really suitable for such.

CSS is a gray area. It's not that hard to learn by yourself if you haven't
already picked up a lot of habits (like layout tables, sliced images, and
spacer images), but if you have picked up such habits, it becomes a lot
more difficult (it's almost always easier to learn to create new mental
models than to learn to replace existing ones).

I think you've got the right idea about taking classes in the areas where
you'll need external resources and the areas that involve broad concepts
(like Unix and TCP/IP) rather than language-specific stuff.

 

[Nick Howes]

On 23 Nov 2003 17:24:37 GMT, (e-mail address removed) (Developwebsites)
wrote:

: Taking into account my time, tuition, book prices, lab fees, etc.
: are these courses better to learn in a class,

Only if the instructress is 38-24-36.

Sid