Comments on: Why learning web development at college is good for you

By: Meera

Meera — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:58:20 +0000

Absolutely! I took one web development course in college and that’s the one that got me addicted. I even went overboard by my helping out friends design and develop their websites for FREE. Couldn’t help it … just got hooked! :D

Oh yea, affected my grades too but it was worth it. Knowledge gained from practical use is better than theory memorized by rote. In fact i just got back into web development after 2.5 year of doing systems programming. It was tough to switch back at first but I do remember the basics that i’ve learned back in college. So that helped increase the learning speed. Glad to be back!

By: Martyn

Martyn — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:30:08 +0000

I enjoy programming in ASP and PHP and neither of them have an X in the name too! Unfortunately I left education long before these languages were introduced and I would have loved the opportunity to have had some structure to learning them let alone whinge about them.

By: James

James — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 19:11:25 +0000

I’d have to agree with your post – even though I spend a lot of time moaning about my teachers at the moment and will probably moan about my lecturers a lot at university, being taught teaches you how to deal with people and how to teach.

(And after I handed in my brief for my last school Computing project last month [a PHP CMS] my teacher commented “so how much code have you taken off the internet for this then?” If you can be polite after that, I think you can be polite after anything.)

By: Stu

Stu — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:59:13 +0000

Same could be said about not going to college/uni and getting work experience instead… you will pick up skills and learn things that will be not be learnt in college. In my opinion, going into the graphics/web design fields a degree is not really essential. A strong portfolio can make up for the fact you don’t have that degree.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 06:27:31 +0000

Nice post! I frequently bitched about the capabilities of my lecturers and tutors in my IS course.

Never saw the silver lining in dealing with this environment until you pointed it out!

Also, if you learn ASP first, PHP is a cinch to pickup (except the $ variable prefixes were hard to get used to)

By: Zach Holman

Zach Holman — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:11:53 +0000

The thing about presenting is that it’s one of those things that, while it can be difficult for some to pick up naturally, if you understand some of the base concepts you’re already doing really, really well. If there’s one thing I’ve picked up over the last couple of years, it’s that real presenting is a skill that most crash and burn on. For some reason people just don’t “get it”. Their slides are crap, they speak too much or too little, or they don’t understand how to target what they’re thinking into words that their audience will understand or pay attention to.

If you do have some decent talent for presenting (either naturally or through practice or both), it really only takes a little bit to make yourself look better than everyone else when they’re presenting. I didn’t like presentations at first either, but now I love to do them; they’re an interesting challenge.

By: Chris Ranjana

Chris Ranjana — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 11:13:40 +0000

Yes.. Ruby on Rails and Dot net would be a good combination to start with.