2013-02-23 - Learning Plan

I’ve almost finished my C# textbook, just a few more chapters left, which means I need to find something to do as a final project and something else to learn. For the final project I’m thinking about building a budgeting application to replace the income/expense tracking I currently do with excel. That would give me a chance to build a lot of controls and also work with MS SQL. I should say that this isn’t a final project from the textbook or a class; it's just that when I've finished learning about a topic I like to do a project on my own to cement what I’ve learned and get some experience doing things from scratch.

Now to the other question, what to learn next? I’ve been looking at python and I think it could be interesting. While looking into it I found out it was named after Monty Python which is certainly a point in its favour. The other thing I want to learn is Visual Basic. It is one of the things a lot of jobs seem to be asking for and it’s also something I’ve been wanting to learn for a while since it seems to be fairly different syntax wise to the c inspired languages I’ve worked with so far. I’d like to get a textbook for Visual Basic and python, but that will have to wait until after I get a job.

I’d also like to learn ASP.net as well as Perl or Ruby at some point. Unless I get a job using one of those I’ll probably hold off for a while though. ASP.net seems like an interesting web technology and the others seem to be useful but there are only so many hours in a day. There’s also my Win32 textbook I’m still working on. I’m 375 pages in and still barely a quarter of the way through the book.