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Self Taught or Educated?  

181 members have voted

  1. 1. Self Taught or Educated?

    • Self Taught
      171
    • Went to school/college
      8
    • Online courses
      3


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self taught here. saved myself a quoted £5000+ in the process by building my recruitment company website myself. I tend to prefer learning off my own bat, as that way I truly understand what i'm doing. Too many people are too trigger happy with Copy+Paste, and whilst I appreciate what schools/colleges teach, they tend to emphasise on the "proper/best practice" way using rubbish scenarios, which isn't ALWAYS the best solution to real problems.
@Crayon: spot on about self-learning.
@graham: yeah i was pretty chuffed. I phoned around several places getting quotes and that was the average. One place wanted just shy of £10,000 (approx US$19,500) for what i was asking. The result of doing it myself is here: http://www.legacyrecruit.com (please excuse the apparent plug. our primary business is Construction/housing, so i actually have nothing to gain apart from providing an example of a self-taught, DIY site)
Bloody hell mate that site is top notch,very slick, easy to navigate also it has a modern look to it, 10,000 QUID!!! unbelievable, but on the same note VERY believable some companies charge scandelous prices, now you have well and truely mastered the PHP site you could even do it for other companies knowing you felt at one time what they might be feeling.

cheers mate

Graham
@Crayon: So. True. :D

I don't know too much, but I'm teaching myself. I don't currently have any books, though I wouldn't be against having them for reference. Until then php.net's online manual and/or Google will have to suffice. And of course these forums. ;)

I've also taught myself everything I know about HTML, CSS, and C++. I wrote my first program on my calculator when I was in the 9th grade and just graduated in June...so...I can't be doing too bad. 8)
[quote author=artacus link=topic=119164.msg488539#msg488539 date=1166569556]
Self taught. I've never been taught something I really wanted to know... pretty deep now that I think about it :)
[/quote]

Not so much, it just means you didn't choose what you wanted to be taught very well... Same here.
The few skills i have is all selftaught but with a major credit to all the pro guys responding at phpfreaks + ofcourse all those asking questions. This was the gate-opener website in terms of learning php and mysql for me. Without it i would probably still be doing cludry cut'n paste with endless parse errors. Still it is strictly on hobby basis, but i never give up the hope that i can actually do it for a living some day. Realism ? well..... the competition is heavy.
Well, the short answer is [i]self-taught[/i], although, I do have an uncle that's been in web dev for years. Thankfully, I've had him to bounce things off of while I've learned. Since I had no formal programming training whatsoever when I started working with web programming, I did have the opportunity to take a couple college level programming courses to help me wrap my brain around the whole OOP concept and get some of the baser programming principles under my belt.

As for (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript and others, they all come with the territory, IMHO. If you're going to work with web, you're going to have to pick up enough of all the others to make anything worthwhile. All my learning of the aforementioned languages is from [b]loads[/b] of reading and even more [b]trial and error[/b] ;)
[quote author=obsidian link=topic=119164.msg489835#msg489835 date=1166731226]All my learning of the aforementioned languages is from [b]loads[/b] of reading and even more [b]trial and error[/b] ;)[/quote]

Isn't that what self-taught [i]really[/i] means....? ;)
just out of interest - and also looking at the results - do they actually teach PHP at school/college, or is it one of those languages that's secondary to things like Pascal, C++ (or even ASP), etc? Genuine question. Quite intersting that in such a specialist area with responses by several switched on people, there are no people that are (or wont admit being) professionally trained.
If they do teach PHP at universities, I'm sure it's not a concentrated area.

I learned the basics on my own, but about a year later, I was recruited by a local software company, and they professionally trained me in the arts of MVC, object-orientation, and various other techniques. I hadn't had much experience with PHP (as I know now), but luckily I was able to learn quickly. I've got only two theories as to why they hired me: Either they saw potential, or they were really desperate.

My "formal schooling" in programming was little - two semesters in high school of copying code out of a book, the principal knew more about the subject matter than the teacher, and the instructor didn't know how to type. He just wasn't cut out for the programming world. :|
[quote author=neylitalo link=topic=119164.msg490403#msg490403 date=1166832338]
My "formal schooling" in programming was little - two semesters in high school of copying code out of a book, the principal knew more about the subject matter than the teacher, and the instructor didn't know how to type. He just wasn't cut out for the programming world. :|
[/quote]

Yeah, sounds about right.

Our "webmastering" class (which I have not taken, why waste time there?) is basically "Here's how to do Basic HTML..." for the first few weeks then, they move onto WYSIWYG programs, and design stuff in there.

-

I was self-taught, motivation came from an idea that my friend and I had thought up, and I wanted to expand on it. So, I learned the basics, started getting the hang of it, learned stuff the hard way (the best way IMO) and yeah, came out where I am now. Although, I did get a lot of help starting out from friends and such. I wouldn't mind sitting in on a PHP class in college, just to see what its like. :)
[quote author=redbullmarky link=topic=119164.msg490390#msg490390 date=1166831187]
just out of interest - and also looking at the results - do they actually teach PHP at school/college, or is it one of those languages that's secondary to things like Pascal, C++ (or even ASP), etc?[/quote]

Well, I know here at the university where I work, there is a "web development" class that branches three different scripting languages. It changes in focus from time to time, but I believe it currently covers .NET framework, PHP and Javascript. There are actually a couple pretty impressive Javascript apps that get pumped out of that class each year.
My College in Cornwall, UK, teaches PHP at BTEC and HND Level. Mainly coz the lecturer hates the M$ way to things and it's easy to teach.

Though I'm self taught for about 3-4 years, there is always something I've missed, so its just a general revision lesson for me.
Well... I have a BS in Computer Engineering... so I guess I can't really say I was completely self-taught.  However, the languages I took in college (C, Java, ASM, Pascal, etc) were not web-related in any way.  I taught myself PHP a few years ago and I've been in love ever since.  It's a lot like C so it was easy to learn.
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