new to programming - please help

[legend_018]

I'm a stay at home mom and was looking for the best course of action to take some programming classes to allow myself to actually GET a job some day in programming.

My initial thought was maybe taking some online courses in C# and .NET. I have one source that offers a beginners and intermediate course in each of them. They only provide Visual Basic .NET though and no other .NET courses.

Than I was told, I will probably never get a job with out a certification. But that costs a lot of money and what is MOST confusing and what brought me to this forum is that I can't figure out what track to take. I read a little bit about (MCAD), but all the classes say require something like 3 months working with developing and using Visual Studio..or something like that.

How am I suppose to have 3 months in the field when I'm new to programming.

I do have my bachelors in business with concentration in IT and have been working in technical support for over 10 years now.

I can't believe I have no chances of getting a job without a certification, arg

[Force Flow]

You can certainly get a job without a certification. Some employers just sometimes prefer to see a certification so they can assume to know at least a basics of what the certification covers.

But, if you show yourself to be knowledgable about the subject, you can certainly get by without it. *Most* certifications don't mean a whole lot, but there a few that do (like cisco's networking certifications)



That said, the only way you get better at programming is more practice and reading up on various techniqures. Working on smaller open source projects or participating in google's summer of code projects usually counts for valid experience.


I wouldn't recommend learning VB. It teaches a lot of bad programming habits.


I like to use this site as a quick reference tool for a whole slew of languages. This is their C# page: http://www.java2s.com/Code/CSharp/CatalogCSharp.htm

Here's a few other resources:
http://sitepoint.com/forum
http://www.go4expert.com/
http://forums.devshed.com/
http://www.codeproject.com/

[legend_018]

Thanks for the advise. I guess google's summer of code projects are for students only.

[faulkner132]

VB.NET is the best way to go in my opinion. Easy to learn, powerful and just about anything you want can be done in it (outside of really low-level stuff). You don't have to worry about memory management or any like that.
Search Microsoft for their VB.NET Express Edition and download it.

I've been using VB for over 10 years now and I have yet to run across anything I couldn't do with it.

Force-
As for bad habits, VB is a tool, not a teacher. Poor teachers teach poor habits and I think their are _a lot_ of poor teachers which happen to use VB as their tool (again, because it is easy to learn) and as a result VB gets a bad rap.
VB is Object Oriented and always has been (for the past 10 years at least) so there is no pigeon-holed method of programming you have to be accustomed to in order to use it.