Oooh, me back

[hippydave]

Feeling my age today, for sure: a mixture of the cold (back to the arctic temperatures of last week after a much nicer weekend) and spending entirely too long this week slumped on the sofa, under (or inside) a sleeping bag, poring over my OU course materials. I'm making an effort this week to sit up properly and spare my poor spine any further

Comments

[theleftcoast]

Props to you and Steen for your back-to-school activities, and I'm pleased to see you're diving right in to the coding course! I know you mentioned Steen getting you a C# manual, and that you're in Visual Studio, but are you actually writing in C# for the course? If so and you want to compare notes, hit me up, that's been my primary application-side programming language for the past couple of years. (with my beloved SQL bread-and-butter on the backend, natch)

[hippydave]

Alas, no - I think the OU feels that C# is entirely too hardcore for Level 1 students, so it's Javascript all the way for the current course. Which is fine, actually, as that's what I had half got to grips with just prior to starting the course. I'd been piddling around with scripts for (a) my own site (coming in 2011) and others, so it's actually nice to have all that self-tutored knowledge backed up with a traditionally taught foundation-up review

[theleftcoast]

Nowt wrong with Javascript, esp. as it's arguably more all-around useful for what you're maybe hoping to do with your acquired programming skillz. I think once you get to it, you'll take to C# like a duck to water -- it and C and Java and Javascript are all related to the point where if you know one, it's not a massive leap to another. It's sort of like knowing one Romance language and then the relative ease with which you can pick up another. BTW - looking forward to your new site in the new year!

[hippydave]

Yeah, I've kinda started to grok the degree to which the three languages are inter-related contextually. I suspect it may lead to some confusion at the beginning, but in time I suspect you're right that it'll save a lot of time when it comes to the basics... :-) I'm looking to be enough of a coder to be useful to an employer - potentially to the college if I stay there, but to other employers if I make a move for whatever reason. Anything else is just a bonus, but I do still have some small ambitions for building some DIY constructs to play with at home, or to use on the new site.

Ah yes, the new site... It'll be some time before it goes live yet - I'm only in the very early stages of deciding what will be included and how it'll look - but really it's just a means of tying a whole bunch of other sites/blogs/pages together and providing an easy way to navigate to a whole bunch of pages that are clogging up my favourites folders. Who knows what else I may add, though!