Classroom Programming Course

gerryR

Hi All

I've a small bit of experience with vb.net, very little but enought to know the basics of programming.

I'm looking for a course in c#.net but can't see any suitable, big problem is it needs to be weekend course as I work during the week.

Does anyone know of any places in Dublin that offer a course like that? I know there's the whole learn yourself bit but I get easily distracted at home and end up doing nothing.

Many thanks for any help
gR

castie

Look for some Microsoft certification courses

John_Mc

gerryR wrote: »

Hi All

I've a small bit of experience with vb.net, very little but enought to know the basics of programming.

I'm looking for a course in c#.net but can't see any suitable, big problem is it needs to be weekend course as I work during the week.

Does anyone know of any places in Dublin that offer a course like that? I know there's the whole learn yourself bit but I get easily distracted at home and end up doing nothing.

Many thanks for any help
gR

The only way to learn it is to do it. Pick a project you're interested in yourself, and start coding it. It'll be tough at the start, and you'll find you spend most of your time googling error messages but as time goes on you'll know more and more.

If you're interested in the project, you shouldn't have the problem of being distracted.

I'm not sure what a certification course could do for you if you didn't have a firm grasp of programming to begin with..

gerryR

Hi,

I understand what your saying about just go out and program something as a project and learn that way.

That's what I did with vb.net, I had a specific task to do and I learned what I needed to and got it working (and enjoyed getting it working a lot) but I know my code wasn't well written.

So from that point, a begginer to intermediate course while I'm starting C# would allow me to learn the basics and more importantly learn how to do them correctly, after that I can pick a project and do it on my own time.

At least that my thinking,

I'll look at the certification stuff but wouldn't that be too advanced?

Thanks
Gerry

NeverSayDie

Well, courses and certification won't teach you to write good code either - they tend to deal in syntax, particular snippets, language principles and constructs, etc. Building quality code though, not so much - to learn that, you need to work on and with non-trivial amounts of code, and in fairness that's a hard thing to fit into a classroom course. You can certainly get pointers, tips and guidance on it (check out the book Code Complete later on, for instance), but writing good code only comes from experience.

Re C#, you already know the basics - due to the way .NET works, C# and VB.NET are the same thing once you go a layer down; they both get turned into the same intermediate stuff (bytecode/IL) before the CLR (the thing that "runs" your code) gets its hands on them. The language syntax is a bit different, but the libraries, capabilities, techniques, etc are pretty much the same. You can even combine the two of them more or less interchangeably when you need to (eg have VB.NET classes inheriting from C# ones, etc). You've already done this in fact - a lot of the .NET Framework library stuff you were using in VB.NET is actually written in C#.

I'd go with the others on this one and recommend that you write some code for yourself for the moment. For example, you could start by taking whatever it was you did in VB.NET and converting it to C#. After that, pick some technology that interests you, or some task you need to do/problem to solve, and write some code to do it.

Lexor

@gerryR: I would definitely agree with the other posters about questioning the value of a certification at this stage of your programing journey and I also very much agree with the point that practice makes perfect!!

Start of with small projects and gradually increase the scale as you get more experience with your chosen language. I have attained certifications in the past (mainly Java related) and while they went into all the little nuances of the language, they certainly don't teach you how to construct your code properly.

From my own experience, I learned C++ coming from a C/assembler background which was a major shift in my programming at the time. Thankfully, the head programmer in the place at the time persevered with me and forced me to keep re-writing the program until it was in 'proper' C++ using 'proper' OO and not bastardised C. They gave me ever increasingly difficult projects to do in C++ and and my way of thinking adjusted to the OO way. No certification (certainly that I know of) can teach you this kind of knowledge.

My final words: find projects/technologies that really interest you and develop your programs with these in mind. This will keep your interest in the project. On early projects you may find that you will be refactoring your code a lot to get it structured correctly, but persevere...get a good book on your chosen language and start from there. As you get better at the programming, you will find that the programming books you will be buying will be less to do with the language and more to do with the structure...good luck!!!

Trampas

I found the learning curve from VB.NET to C# very small