[Tutor] A slighty off topic question/rant for the experienced .

[alan.gauld@bt.com]

> >> What led me on this road was the false belief that since I 
> >> knew how to write code college was a waste of time.  
> 
> What kind of school do you guys praise?  Some kind of university? Or
> some kind of college?  Examples you might compare?

At work we insist on university education(Masters preferred). 
You can be a coder (even a good one) with just high school or college 
level but it is very hard to move up the "value chain" into 
architect/design type roles from there.

You really need to understand more than just coding, you need to 
appreciate some more fundamental things, including fairly heavy 
math type things. Machine structures and compiler theory, 
state machines, queuing theory, algorithm design etc etc. 
You get those in a degree course.

Of course the type of degree course is another matter, we don't 
insist on CS or SE courses, we will take anyone with a good numerical 
degree(engineering/math/science etc) with significant programming 
experience.

> Do you like to learn abstractly, or practically?

You need both. It's essential for a good designer to be able 
to think abstractly and to write good code and develop performant 
systems you must think practically too.

Two books that illustrate this in different ways are:

The Pragmatic Programmer - I think Magnus already mentioned it.

IT Architectures & Middleware - really about building large 
distributed systems. But covers the real world issues of 
building industry strength software well.

I recommend both.

Alan g.
Author of the 'Learning to Program' web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld