Another Ping for CPSC people

[Karim]

I'm in a QA internship position for a company that makes reservoir simulations. It's pretty cool but I eventually want to be more on the development/designing side of things. A friend of mine got an internship as a developer where he quickly realized that university doesn't teach very many practical development skills. Things like MFC, STL are not touched upon at all and he's scrambling to learn as much as quickly as possible.

So is this just a bad CPSC program or are there universities that actually offer courses in Windows develoment? If the lack of courses is pretty standard, do most people just learn on the job or on their own time? I'm guessing with so many books and tutorials out there, universities feel teaching that stuff is a waste of time.

[gstelmack]

Universities are going to teach algorithms, data structures, and other bits that are far more useful and broad-based than anything like languages, OSes, and the like. You'll get those as an aside to the particular course or by doing work on your own.

You can take separate professional courses in things like Windows development, but mostly you want a good book and compiler (note that the Visual Studio Express editions are free and perfect for learning) and lots of experience. There are also decent web sites out there that help you learn particular areas; codeproject.com is one of my favorites. Pick a project and start messing around on your own.

[Karim]

Cool. Thanks for the response to a question I've had for a while.

[gstelmack]

I'm still waiting to find out what the Consumer Product Safety Commission has to do with this thread...