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Subject:Re: Technical development From:Dave Walker <walker -at- RANKIN -dot- ASPENTEC -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 21 Sep 1993 13:30:15 EST
Jane,
In addition to the advice from Chuck and Faith:
You probably should take the basic intro course that every CS major takes.
BU has a good Intro to Computing (I think it covers two semesters) offered
through the Metro campus (night classes). Harvard Extension also has a good
intro to computing but is only one semester. Personally, I'd pick BU over
Harvard extension based on reputation. You should check out other schools,
but if you're serious about software engineering or computer science, be wary of
courses that only teach programming languages. There's a big difference between
programming and computer science/software engineering.
Make sure any course you take teaches a useful language.
Both the BU and Harvard courses use C, which is good if you want to do any
Unix, MS Windows, or oop (these days it seems most GUIs are written
in C or C++). Also be wary of courses like the MIT intro, which uses
SCHEME (a subset of LISP) in the intro course.
After the first intro course, you may want to take a course in data structures
(if it's not covered in the intro).
The intro course(s) and data structures are the basic core classes. After that,
you can probably learn what you want from good books or job experience
(assuming you get a job as a CS/SE). You also could take more advanced classes,
depending on what you want to learn (e.g., computer graphics, operating
systems, networks, etc.)
In the meantime, get involved as much as you can with the software your company
develops. If you work on online documetation, learn as much about it as you
can. Look for things that need to be done that might involve writing macros in
a WP program as a start (both WP and Word have some good docs on their macro
languages).
Once you get some experience programming, tell your supervisor you'd be
interested in helping out the engineers by working on small projects that
involve some coding (all great computer scientists had to start somewhere).
If you're interested in both writing and CS, opportunities are opening up
working with SGML, which often require technical skills (check out the
comp.text.sgml newsgroup if you have a newsfeed at your site).
good luck,
dave walker
development engineer
for documentation
Aspen Technology, Inc.
walker -at- aspentec -dot- com
