I miss the days when a computer science degree meant they had a good understanding from hardware all the way to user applications with everything in between. You won't find many people who know how a compiler works or what registers are for.

I use Eclipse for my IDE and I'm pretty sure there are a couple plugins that are for or help you write wiki markup/down.

It depends on the type of education you want. In a two-year program there isn't time to teach everything. But if you're working toward a Bachelor of Computer Science or something, which for me was a four-year program, they should teach you the basics. For example I took courses in assembly and compiler construction.

Your program sounds more like a technical college or something. Learning Asp.Net web programming is not how you learn to be a true software developer. They should be teaching you Object Oriented principles, first of all, and web programming is really not the first thing you want to learn (the client/server stuff makes things confusing), unless that's all your program is about.

I agree with you; a large number of software developers in the work force aren't true software developers or engineers, they've simply taken a few programming courses like the one you're taking.

However, many of them don't need all the stuff you're talking about. They won't be great software developers, but often they don't have to be. They can still code and get things done... but we don't put those people in charge of making technical decisions or building frameworks or architecture or anything.

If you want that kind of education, of course you're gonna have to spend more time and money.

Teaching you how to build a web app "From scratch" would be quite the monster of a course, depending what you mean....

And guys, the code you see when you view source in your browser is client-side code and markup. What you keep calling "code behind" is the server side code, i.e. C# dot net or Vb dot net, in this case. The most important thing to understand in web programming is what happens at each tier and how they interact: browser (client machine), web server and database server.

All of this is very complicated; it takes a long time to teach all of it. And not everyone in the workforce needs to know it right away in order to start being productive.

As for the problems with the IDE... there are problems with all new software. You work around the bugs until they are fixed, or you don't upgrade to the new version until you know it's stable for your purposes.

Yeah, I''m in a two year community college program.

I have had a class on Object Oriented Programming. The principals seem simple enough. However the book code and the instructor code could have been two different languages sometimes. Community colleges have technicians who are skilled in their area, but are not necessarily trained educators.

I still can't write C# from memory, other than maybe "Hello World". LOL

I'm in my third year of a two year degree, going very part-time while I work. We have a 4 year program here, Ferris State University has a satellite campus here for the bachelors in CIS. Computer Information Systems, not Computer Science. http://www.ferris.edu/business/programs/computer-systems

I think you're right, it seems they just want to pump out "Code Monkeys" and not software developers here. So, get the piece of "paper" and the real education begins after leaving college.

One class probably isn't going to cut it unless you'd already been exposed to the concepts and used them in practice. Most programmers think they're using OO but don't really get it. It usually takes a while to really understand what it's all about. I see it all the time... like one example is when people write a class and then use it like a static (shared) class without actually declaring it static, then they are always instantiating it to use its methods... or they create a class method and pass in parameters when it should have been an instance method and just referenced its own instance variables... that sort of misuse of OO concepts is the most annoying thing about code monkeys.



Yeah, you can do that. Personally I'm glad I did the four years... some people never get the time to learn the stuff properly once they enter the work force.

Yeap, everything you just said, I don't have a clue of what to use when. They really haven't spent time in the thought that I believe should go into pre-programming, they just jump us right into coding. Do this, do that and it works, but we really don't know why. Like you said, they don't have time to teach us what we really need to know.

The concepts I understand about OOP are very basic. Like creating a business class library for my own formatting preferences to use in this and other programs. That saves a lot of time. Also creating a class that will be inherited by other classes. Example Car Class is inherited by Model Class, etc. That makes a lot of sense and eliminates redundant code. So, I do like OOP, I do need a lot more practice using it.

Oh yeah! When I first took the HTML4 course, they had us using something called Web Expressions. It was such a PITA I just coded in notepad and used Filezilla to upload my homework.

Now of course I use Visual Studio to develop web pages, Notepad ++ to debug JavaScript.

I do like HTML5 better, a lot less <div>'s, but I'm still playing around with formatting the container tags with CSS. Laying out a page in tables is so much easier, but too ridged today when people are viewing pages with different size view screens.

They aren't teaching Computer Science at my community college. They are teaching Computer Information Systems (CIS).

I did find this course, The Elements of Computing Systems http://www.nand2tetris.org/. I started building my logic gates, I need to get back and finish this course. This teaches building a computer from the Nand gate through memory elements, machine language, assembly, compiler, OS and eventually applications. In the end, this "computer" should be equivalent to my old Palm Pilot PDA.

When I finish this course, I should have a deeper understanding of how the hardware - software works.

I agree with astro. i was in a 4 year program. It was called Computer Information Systems. and it consisted of a variety of programming classes, databases, software engineering from start to finish, help support for users, there were some for assembly, security, networking, hardware... the list goes on. kinda sad i didn't finish it. but i learnt C++ to start. basics. and then went onto object oriented principles. It was stuff I kind of already knew from playing around as i grew up. but it was a nice introduction into concepts and design.

In the long run, i find picking up new languages fairly easy. sure I don't know everything, but it is easier to adapt and learn with the background programming knowledge.

heck, i still love learning and playing around with stuff. even though i'm not employed in the field.

I mostly went to college for the degree. There were only a few things they taught that I had not already explored or taught myself by the time I got there. It helps if you are already interested and can find projects to work on outside of school. Doesn't need to be anything complex or complicated, but you will learn things while tinkering than can help later on. Solving problems and figuring out how systems work will help you predict what problems you can run into with systems you design later on.

I'd also recommend firebug for firefox if you have to debug javascript. It will make your life easier.

I use firebug a lot when making responsive web pages. I haven't used it do debug js yet, thanks for the tip.

I also learned to code first without an IDE. I think that's the best way; big IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse do so much that it's very difficult for a new programmer to understand what's going on.

For a long time, Firebug was the best thing for javascript programmers. These days, modern browsers usually have something relatively equivalent.. e.g. IE9 and IE10 have the F12 developer tools (so does IE8, but not as advanced). Also, Visual Studio can be set up to debug javascript. No doubt Eclipse can be, as well, although I haven't used that much for web programming. At work I do most of my coding in Visual Studio.



Yeah... layout with CSS is not intuitive, not least because different browsers (in government, up till about three years ago I had to work with IE6, which was an utter nightmare) often react differently, although that's getting better these days. Read about the CSS float and clear properties... and again, the browser's developer tools can help you by showing details about the rendered layout visually.

Yeah, I use clear and float in CSS. Just recently I'm working on a page, the body is 75% wide. Inside the body I have the main content section that's 90% of the body, and inside the main content I have the aside at 25% width, float left, and the context section at 68% width float right. A little room between for padding and margins, etc. This was using aspx master pages. One page looked exactly perfect, the aside and context next to each other, the next page the aside fell below the context, still floating left/right, but the top of the aside was below the bottom on the context section. Body, header, footer and aside were in the master page. Only the context section was unique to each page created from the master page. Goofy stuff!