Re: Future of RPG: What language would you learn?

On 11/08/2010, at 1:27 AM, Arthur Marino wrote:

I'm willing to spend a pot of money going full-time to some place like
NYU, or wherever they'll give me the whole picture. Right now, if I want
to go at night to learn Excel or Power Point, I have my pick of places.
Java? None that I can find. It's discouraging.

You won't get the "whole picture" at an educational institute either but it will give you time to learn the class library. Doing that well is what it takes to be a good Java, C++, Smalltalk, etc. programmer. All the class libraries are huge and learning one takes a LOT of time. However, getting to that point still makes you a fairly basic OO programmer (presuming you're actually writing OO code and not just procedural Java, C++, or whatever). No OO course of any description will make you an OO programmer or designer. They will give you the tools with which to start. Then you need to find a job using those tools in an environment that fosters a mentoring system with someone at the top (e.g., project manager, team leader, designer) who will arrange for proper structured knowledge transfer to lower-order team members regarding the design, why things are being done that way, and design exercises. Something like an afternoon a week for all team members to learn about OO from the current OO implementation. You need a really good mentor with lots of experience for this to work well.

Also, read any book by Kent Beck and read "Thinking in Java" by Bruce Eckel (?)--available on-line) and others of that nature.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
FlyByNight Software OS/400, i5/OS Technical Specialists

http://www.flybynight.com.au/
Phone: +61 2 6657 8251 Mobile: +61 0411 091 400 /"\
Fax: +61 2 6657 8251 \ /
X
ASCII Ribbon campaign against HTML E-Mail / \
--------------------------------------------------------------------