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I'm looking at the class catalog from SWIC and two degrees I'm looking at:

CIS Tech Support/Help Desk(010A)
Software Development(010C)

I really want to get into programming, but I do have some experience in providing tech support. Mostly showing people how to do basic stuff. My main goal is to be able to write Linux applications.

This will take me a long while to earn my degree...

Without knowing anything specific I would guess that the help desk courses aren't really geared towards computer science students, and I'd be very surprised if there was any course material outside of Windows.

If it's programming you want to learn, then take a class on programming. If it works out for you there will be plenty others after that.

Redocbew wrote:

Without knowing anything specific I would guess that the help desk courses aren't really geared towards computer science students, and I'd be very surprised if any there was any course material outside of Windows.

If it's programming you want to learn, then take a class on programming. If it works out for you there will be plenty others after that.

Thanks, programming it is then. I noticed the programming degree requires me to take one class of Visual Basic, and two classes of C#. I just installed Mono and Mono Basic in Manjaro. How well can I write cross platform applications with C# and Visual Basic for both Windows and Linux?

I haven't tried Mono personally, but for introductory programming it'll probably be just fine. Of course, you'll need to figure it out on your own, because your class will probably be using visual studio.

Redocbew wrote:

I haven't tried Mono personally, but for introductory programming it'll probably be just fine. Of course, you'll need to figure it out on your own, because your class will probably be using visual studio.

Looks like I just might be forced to buy a copy of Windows 10 and visual studio in order to do my homework....

whm1974 wrote:

Thanks, programming it is then. I noticed the programming degree requires me to take one class of Visual Basic, and two classes of C#.

I hope the curriculum has more than 3 classes worth of programming...or are these just the languages you don't know?

Waco wrote:

whm1974 wrote:

Thanks, programming it is then. I noticed the programming degree requires me to take one class of Visual Basic, and two classes of C#.

I hope the curriculum has more than 3 classes worth of programming...or are these just the languages you don't know?

Oh it does have more then three classes of programming, including SQL. I just mention the first three as something I noticed.

SQL is a fun (and not simple at all) dive into efficient queries. I'm a bit out of touch - do dev degrees include assembly, C, or anything low-level these days? I'm always short on developers that actually understand how hardware works.

Waco wrote:

SQL is a fun (and not simple at all) dive into efficient queries. I'm a bit out of touch - do dev degrees include assembly, C, or anything low-level these days? I'm always short on developers that actually understand how hardware works.

Well I could take two C++ classes for my electives.

Waco wrote:

SQL is a fun (and not simple at all) dive into efficient queries. I'm a bit out of touch - do dev degrees include assembly, C, or anything low-level these days?

Mine did, but shortly after I graduated they changed the curriculum to make it easier. The school wanted more CS majors by juking the stats. Even before that I think it took a while before many of my classmates really knew what it meant when their program barfed and the console said "segmentation fault". I did because I had been a hardware geek for a while before that, but the early courses especially were much more conceptual and software based. It wasn't until later when we got into assembly, data structures, and concurrency that we started to see why things were happening.

whm1974 wrote:

Waco wrote:

SQL is a fun (and not simple at all) dive into efficient queries. I'm a bit out of touch - do dev degrees include assembly, C, or anything low-level these days? I'm always short on developers that actually understand how hardware works.

Well I could take two C++ classes for my electives.

C and C++ are not the same thing.

Waco wrote:

SQL is a fun (and not simple at all) dive into efficient queries. I'm a bit out of touch - do dev degrees include assembly, C, or anything low-level these days? I'm always short on developers that actually understand how hardware works.

In my experience, no. You either get people ready to build the next big "app" or people argue over which languages and programming theory -- applied vs theoretical. Computer Science is not about computers, with rare exception, programming is not taught in the context of what it actually does inside a computer or processor.

--SS

Dunno about whm's school but at mine—a community college, not MIT, but I expect his is similar—the lowest-level language taught is C++.

Anything deeper is apparently an electrical engineering program at a four-year school (click on course descriptions on this page for example). What surprised me looking at the same school's CS program is how it's not that different from mine aside from some year-long group project, a bit of extra math, and an apparent focus on "social implications of computing".

Redocbew wrote:

Waco wrote:

SQL is a fun (and not simple at all) dive into efficient queries. I'm a bit out of touch - do dev degrees include assembly, C, or anything low-level these days?

Mine did, but shortly after I graduated they changed the curriculum to make it easier. The school wanted more CS majors by juking the stats. Even before that I think it took a while before many of my classmates really knew what it meant when their program barfed and the console said "segmentation fault". I did because I had been a hardware geek for a while before that, but the early courses especially were much more conceptual and software based. It wasn't until later when we got into assembly, data structures, and concurrency that we started to see why things were happening.

Maybe I'm just not seeing it, but I don't see any C courses anywhere in the catalog. Can I learn C using C++ and C# in a around about way?

whm1974 wrote:

Can I learn C using C++ and C# in a around about way?

Can you learn German in a roundabout way by learning English?

whm1974 wrote:

Maybe I'm just not seeing it, but I don't see any C courses anywhere in the catalog. Can I learn C using C++ and C# in a around about way?

I've learned that the syntax might be similar but every language and class library has its own naming conventions and there's no way to learn them without actually writing in that language.

Besides, weren't you going to learn C on your own? You've got five 3 months. Get going.

I do support. Helpdesk, deskside, bench, field tech, network tech, you get the idea. I really do mean I "DO SUPPORT" and have been for about 25 years.
From my point of view support is slowly going away.

In the general consumer space hardware support is just about done. Crappy computers are as cheap to replace as they are to repair and I'm expecting some serious contraction.
Small business on up to corporate support I'm expecting to hold steady or expand just a little bit.
Business are more likely to lease rather than own computers and many only keep machine for the warranty period.
If you are certified for dell machines then you can do warranty repairs in house. In large corps this is being farmed out to compucom and other onsite support companies.

Now management and admin as a whole is weird. In the future it is going to be less about the devices and more about the network.
Network techs, network, server, database, administration and security these seem to be becoming more specialized and more valuable jobs.
What with the "cloud" its hard to know if the field is going to expand or contract.

Finally you have customer support (helpdesk) and think this job is going to expand and get even more crappy that has been in the past and will pay every less money and you will get ever more abuse. Hard ware will get cheaper allowing more people who have no idea how the tech works to pick up things and expect it to "just work" and it never will.
I'd stay well away from customer support!

Software development has the larger potential to make you rich. Come up with a cool game everyone wants to play and you could find yourself swimming in cash.

whm1974 wrote:

I'm looking at the class catalog from SWIC and two degrees I'm looking at:

CIS Tech Support/Help Desk(010A)
Software Development(010C)

I really want to get into programming, but I do have some experience in providing tech support. Mostly showing people how to do basic stuff. My main goal is to be able to write Linux applications.

This will take me a long while to earn my degree...

Support/Help Desk is not going to get you any closer to writing Linux applications. As Redocbew indicates, it is almost certainly going to be completely Windows-centric, with little or no software development content.

whm1974 wrote:

Thanks, programming it is then. I noticed the programming degree requires me to take one class of Visual Basic, and two classes of C#. I just installed Mono and Mono Basic in Manjaro. How well can I write cross platform applications with C# and Visual Basic for both Windows and Linux?

Well, they're not normally the first choice for doing cross-platform stuff, but the MonoDevelop IDE is apparently cross-platform and supports both languages. Based on what I'm seeing, it certainly appears possible.

whm1974 wrote:

Looks like I just might be forced to buy a copy of Windows 10 and visual studio in order to do my homework....

They're probably using a free version of Visual Studio. But yeah, you'll at least want a copy of Windows in a VM, assuming they're using Windows in the class.

Waco wrote:

SQL is a fun (and not simple at all) dive into efficient queries.

I hesitate to call it a programming language in its own right, unless you get into the various stored procedure languages (like Transact-SQL). You definitely need to know it if you're going to do any sort of database development though. Most web applications are backed by a database in some way, so web development frequently requires some knowledge of SQL as well.

Waco wrote:

I'm a bit out of touch - do dev degrees include assembly, C, or anything low-level these days? I'm always short on developers that actually understand how hardware works.

There seems to be much less of an emphasis on C/assembly these days. The business unit I work for has a couple hundred devs (give or take), and I'm in the small minority of developers there who know C/assembly or have any clue about what the hardware's doing (I'd say there's probably about a dozen of us total). The "low level" guys probably average at least a decade older than the rest of the devs.

Redocbew wrote:

Even before that I think it took a while before many of my classmates really knew what it meant when their program barfed and the console said "segmentation fault". I did because I had been a hardware geek for a while before that, but the early courses especially were much more conceptual and software based. It wasn't until later when we got into assembly, data structures, and concurrency that we started to see why things were happening.

Yeah, many (probably a majority) of the devs where I work have only a vague idea of what a "segmentation fault" means. Which means I get asked to look at core dump files on a semi-regular basis to help figure out why something blew up.

Norphy wrote:

whm1974 wrote:

Well I could take two C++ classes for my electives.

C and C++ are not the same thing.

C is essentially a subset of C++. Most of the procedural stuff, but lacks classes/templates, iterators, etc. You can generally write C code, feed it to a C++ compiler, and have it compile; but you can't do the reverse.

whm1974 wrote:

Maybe I'm just not seeing it, but I don't see any C courses anywhere in the catalog. Can I learn C using C++ and C# in a around about way?

See above. The trick will be knowing which parts of C++ you can't use when you're coding in C. The other issue is that C++ encourages object oriented programming, whereas with C, you're working with a strictly procedural paradigm (no OOP). So it's a very different way of looking at a problem and decomposing it into manageable chunks. A well-structured C++ program to solve a non-trivial problem will tend to look rather different from a well-structured C program to solve the same problem.

If you leverage the bleeding edge features of the newer C++ dialects (like C++11), the code can look absolutely nothing like C (or even earlier dialects of C++). C++11 really threw me for a loop when I first encountered it a couple of years ago.

Captain Ned wrote:

Can you learn German in a roundabout way by learning English?

That would certainly be easier than learning German via Chinese! Not a particularly good analogy though, since C++ is effectively a superset of C, but English is not a superset of German.

(IMO learning German via Chinese would be like learning C via LISP...)

Being able to write applications is something I always wanted to do. Looks like at the moment I'm going to have to learn C on my own since that is one language I always wanted to learn anyway.

The catalog does have one Linux course, but it is listed under networking.... Depending on many extra classes I take, looks like I'm going to be busy for awhile.

Waco wrote:

SQL is a fun (and not simple at all) dive into efficient queries. I'm a bit out of touch - do dev degrees include assembly, C, or anything low-level these days? I'm always short on developers that actually understand how hardware works.

Another anecdote for your consideration...

During my CS work (starting in 2004 and finishing in 2009), and even to this day (I just looked at the courses required to grad with CS at my school - a public, state Uni), we were required to take multiple low-level focused courses.

Embedded Systems that included C and Assembly.
Digital Logic Design while not exactly what we're talking about, and VHDL.
Computer Architecture which included multiple low-level topics and languages.
Programming Languages which is kind of an audit of a lot of stuff just trying to give you a good basis of things you hadn't learned through your previous two or three years in the program.
Compiler Construction was usually C or PASCAL.
Introduction to Operating Systems which mostly covered Linux and all its underlying craziness.

There are quite a few more electives that you could take to beef up on more low-level stuff, but these are the ones that were required to graduate in CS at my school. IMO a pretty decent foundation of low-level stuff to have when you're only 22-25 or however old when you graduate.

Edit: FWIW, I do want to emphasize that my CS program was in the Engineering school at my Uni. There are A LOT of CS programs in the Math/Liberal Arts schools at a lot of universities. There is a big, big difference in the underlying courses required to really get into the nitty gritty depending on which school you're in, and I think that's a big part of why the cirriculum is halfway decent at my school.

Good for them. More CS curricula should be like that IMO.

JBI wrote:

C is essentially a subset of C++. Most of the procedural stuff, but lacks classes/templates, iterators, etc. You can generally write C code, feed it to a C++ compiler, and have it compile; but you can't do the reverse.

It's good to clarify with "generally" because I've had the unfortunate experience of having to tell a group, like five times, that while this particular construct expressed via a K&R variant of C will be happily compiled by the C compiler on their platform, no. Forever No. It will never be successfully compiled with the C++ compiler on their platform. As you said, it is "essentially" a subset, but not absolutely one. Maybe C89 is guaranteed, but who knows.

I could not make them understand that. "what do you mean, C++ is a superset of C, we've only and always used the C++ compiler etc..." Faced with either hand re-writing the auto-generated code (RPC stub) and invariably having someone else "build-all" destroy it in ignorance, I gave up and gave them the object code I compiled elsewhere myself and then blatantly broke the code descriptor with a non-comment ALL CAPS paragraph about why.

So they can't change it, but they can't break it either.

Yeah, I should've clarified. A modern dialect of C, not K&R C.

JBI wrote:

Yeah, I should've clarified. A modern dialect of C, not K&R C.

Eh, I was commending you for saying it as you did.

You qualified it, whereas I run into people who think it is a universal truth and will not accept any empirical result to the contrary.

Grrrr.....

oh man and don't even get me started on my story about the guy who "wanted to do NEW things!" but didn't realize that name-mangling was a thing and started messing with the make files.



GGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.................

My clarification could've been... clearer.

K&R 1st ed. is of historical interest only at this point. K&R 2nd ed. is OK as far as it goes, but doesn't prepare you to write real-world code in the 21st century. K&R should not be recommended as an introductory text any more, and I shudder when I see people do it.

just brew it! wrote:

My clarification could've been... clearer.

K&R 1st ed. is of historical interest only at this point. K&R 2nd ed. is OK as far as it goes, but doesn't prepare you to write real-world code in the 21st century. People should not recommend K&R as an introductory text any more, and I shudder when I see people do it.

To be fair, not much does except....writing real code in a job.

DancinJack wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

My clarification could've been... clearer.

K&R 1st ed. is of historical interest only at this point. K&R 2nd ed. is OK as far as it goes, but doesn't prepare you to write real-world code in the 21st century. People should not recommend K&R as an introductory text any more, and I shudder when I see people do it.

To be fair, not much does except....writing real code in a job.

Quite true. Time for a minor digression/rant...

Getting a degree won't teach you what you need to survive as a "real world" dev either, but it gives you a foundation of knowledge on which to build. The piece of paper that says you got that degree also opens doors, and may convince someone to give you a chance who wouldn't otherwise.

One of my co-workers doesn't have a degree. Just wandered in one day when we were having a job fair and started chatting people up; managed to get himself invited back for a series of more intensive interviews. Management and HR didn't want to hire him (because of the lack of a degree). It took basically everyone on the dev team who had interviewed him going "WTF, this guy really knows his sh*t, make him a f*cking offer!" to get him hired. He's better than many devs with 4 (or more!) year degrees, but the lack of academic credentials came really close to sinking his chances.

I realize that a degree (or lack thereof) is often used as an initial screening tool, and I can understand why. HR/management is looking for a way to whittle down the applicant pool to avoid wasting time needlessly interviewing people who probably won't make the cut. But this guy had made it past the initial screen (well, sort of bypassed it), and through the interview gauntlet (aced it, pretty much), and still nearly got bonged. That's just wrong. At least sanity prevailed in the end.

Edit: And another rant (this time directed at applicants): Why, oh why, would you show up at a job fair (for technical positions, no less) without a copy of your resume? You would be amazed how many people do this. Seriously, WTF? I realize that if you're still in school (or a recent grad) you may not have a job history, but we at least want to see something. Languages you know, projects you've completed as part of your coursework, anything you've done on the side, that kind of thing.

just brew it! wrote:

whm1974 wrote:

Looks like I just might be forced to buy a copy of Windows 10 and visual studio in order to do my homework....

They're probably using a free version of Visual Studio. But yeah, you'll at least want a copy of Windows in a VM, assuming they're using Windows in the class.

Hold off spending money. Windows 10 is available through Microsoft Imagine, if your school is a member. I haven't had to pay for anything, and that includes VS 2017 Professional (although VS 2017 Community will work just fine), Windows 10, Visio, and Office 365.

JBI wrote:

He's better than many devs with 4 (or more!) year degrees, but the lack of academic credentials came really close to sinking his chances.

The best programmer I've ever known *might* have an associate degree. In any event, his resume doesn't list it.

He just started doing it in high school and was so ridiculously good at it that he walked right into a job.

I don't think I've ever met another developer who isn't self taught by some amount, and once you're on the job being able to teach yourself new languages and platforms usually becomes a requirement in its self.