Category: Career Growth

I just thought I’d share that as of today, six of the top ten books at safari.oreilly.com comes from the Head First Series. Namely: [more]

1. Head First C#
2. Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
3. Head First Design Patterns
4. Head First JavaScript
5. Head First Servlets and JSP
6. Head First SQL

For me, this says a lot. I’m sure the Oreilly library has a good number of users, they can’t all be wrong and Head First books must be good.

And yes, I’d have to agree. I have a Head First PMP and though I never had the chance to finish it yet and it’s not in the top ten list (probably because not everyone enjoys PM) I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far. And having read a thing or two about learning styles and cognition, I’d have to say their approach is very effective.

So, if you have a topic you want to learn (beginner/immediate) and Head First has a book for it, I would recommend you go for it. The fun and learning will be worth your money.

You can also check out the safari library samples and if you’re comfortable reading online, you’d save more.

The new and improved Microsoft Connect v3.0 (a way to share and connect with Microsoft regarding their products) is up as of Saturday, March 22, 2008. [more]

“You can participate in Microsoft Connect in several ways, such as
downloading the latest software and written material, taking surveys,
exchanging ideas in newsgroup forums, and, most importantly, providing
and reviewing feedback about your experiences. Your feedback enables
Microsoft to make software and services the best that they can be, and
you can learn about and contribute to exciting projects.”

This project was down for sometime but the MCHelp Team is “confident that our customers will be pleased with the changes
and feature upgrades in this release.”

Another good site to track.

Just came across this site for bookworms. There you will books I’ve read, reading and will read (hopefully) as well as reviews for those books if I have time and if I’m even good at it.

I was thinking of [more] having my book list and reviews here in my site or my blog but I figured I’ll let some other site (and people) work on these stuff and I’ll deal with other things instead like making this site/blog a useful resource for developers. I’ll probably have a separate permanent link for this but for the meantime you might be interested to join too. (admit it, most of us are bookworms one way or another)

My BookWormr profile (ohh and not sure what the R at the end stands for – probably bookworm-er?, dunno)

While surfing around Developer Center links in msdn online I came across the interesting Beginner Developer Learning Center.

a centralized learning environment specifically targeted to beginning programmers. Here you’ll find a rich array of learning content that starts with the very basics, and guides you through step-by-step to becoming a fully-fledged developer!

No experience or programming knowledge required – so dive right in! [more]

In most forums and in real life, one of the most common questions is where to I start if I want to learn programming. The answer would (IMHO) take a very long time to discuss with regards to what language (this in itself could take ages to debate on), learning design vs. syntactics and semantics of a language, web/windows  and the list goes on.

But if you want to skip the issues above and as the site says “dive right in” with primarily Microsoft technologies then this is a good place to start. And though again the debate could go along way with choosing the right tools and platform, being a .NET Developer (with very minimal knowledge on other languages and platform) I can safely say that development with Microsoft is a very good start (if not very till the end).

Currently the first step is figuring out whether the aspiring developer would like to start on web or windows development and then moving forward with Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 developement.

Of course in addition to this, there is always the ASP.NET GetStarted and Learning Site and Windows Client GetStarted and Learning Site (just knew about this too and got redirected when i typed in windowsforms.net)

Will see if I could update this from time to time or maybe a separate links for learning links. Hope this helps anyone. Enjoy coding!