Well Finally have a job in software development

[davetherave2]

Well I have been working in IT for over 5 years now and have mainly had support jobs but finally a company has decided I might be suitable for their development team. I have always been interested in programming and have tried to keep my skills as up to date as I can.

Over the past couple of months I have been cramming like crazy and the suggestions of books that you fine people have made has really helped (who knew so much went behind a pretty front end) on all things .net. I have mainly been looking at C# to try and get a job. I have found it so difficult to get into this side of the computer world and it has paid off starting next week I finally can start following my passion and call myself a developer albeit a junior one but its a start.

So that I can try to continue my studies I have several books already for pursuing the various MS exams as well as building up on the basics that I have. I was wondering if anyone knew of any decent material for developing XML/web based systems as this is an area which I think I will need to invest some quality time in. It has been a while since I did anything serious in web dev so anything will help.

I certainly expect the next few months to be a massive learning curve for me but I just can't wait.

 

[davetherave2]

OO stuff I am fine with as I have finally got my head around it. It took a dummies book for me to finally get it. In the 4 years of uni I had I couldn't fully understand it, think that was more down to me not really caring and bored with my degree rather than not understanding the subject at hand. I have always tried to code stuff using OO principles even that languages that don't transfer over to OO properly such as VBA which I have done most of my coding in the last 6 months.

As for the Dietel and Dietel book I have the four edition of that but never really cared for C++ although it is a powerful language I didn't really get on with unlike I have done with C#. I'm sure when I finally start the role I will find out more info on what I am doing but can't wait to get my teeth into it.

The main bulk of the work I am going to be doing is debugging so that will help me loads with developing my skills and understanding the languages better. I'm guessing I won't be doing my own programs for at least 6 - 12 months and even then they will probably only be add on's to existing apps that they have. But everyones got to start somewhere.