April 6, 2004
spout
Filling In Missing Computer Science Knowledge
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Sometimes I get emails from folks
that don’t have a formal computer science knowledge and want the benefits of one
w/o actually going back to college. Since I was disappointed in my own formal
education (despite going on to “better” my BS in Computer Science with an MS), I
can understand this desire.
My first thought was
the MIT Open Courseware, which has a full course of computer science
curriculum. However, while the course material is all there, unless there are
officially sanctioned forums for each course, there’s really no place to ask
questions even of fellow students.
After thinking on it for a
while, I thought I’d go right to my favorite source.
Prof. Joe Hummel is a professor of computer science at Lake Forest College
in Illinois and has spent a lot of time thinking about how to fill in missing CS
knowledge in professional programmers (VB programmers, mostly) at DevelopMentor.
Here’s what he said:
For starters, I’d recommend a book by
Brookshear called
“Computer Science: an overview” (8th edition). It’s written for those
new to CS, but introduces lots of nice CS concepts like algorithm analysis,
theory of computation (e.g. that some problems cannot be solved!), and other
things like OS, networks, DBs, etc. It’s a great starter book. After that,
I’d recommend books on data structures and algorithms. After that, it really
depends on what his interests are: Programming Languages? Theory? Operating
Systems? Distributed Systems? Software Eng? AI?
Discuss
April 5, 2004
tools
WiX: Open Source XML-Based MSI Creation
Rob Mensching, an MS SDE, has finally released his WiX tools for building MSI files from XML. I say “finally,” because I’ve been using his tools for months to build the MSI files that MSDN puts up on microsoft.com/download. All of our downloads have to be wrapped in an MSI so that you have to agree to the EULA before you get the files. Plus, we need to bundle some descriptive text and author name in there, along with the code that pops open the install folder after the files have been installed. Instead of using VS.NET to create the MSI files for each set of folks, I built a tool and the best programatic interface to creating MSI files that I could find was easily Rob’s. Check it out.
April 5, 2004
.net
Is This One Better? Now Cover the Other Eye…
Here.
Kevin Lindsey has been exploring Avalon and posting some things he didn’t expect. I love how he posts pictures of what he expected alongside of what he actually got:
Keep it up, Kevin!
