jbv wrote: "sorry to be so abrasive"
Ha, Ha; nothing wrong with a bit of abrasion; I have scars to prove it! Love You All! What really scares me are the folks who cannot cope with a bit of abrasion. I do like your "Kill your fear of programming in 1 day" Maybe "the 'P' word" should jump up on the shelf with such other heros such as "the 'F' word" - however that would be a wee bit too politically correct for the likes of me, and Real Programming is 'F-word' hard work :) Now both you and I, and a fair few folk forbye can take somebody else's work and tweak it about; that, however, is not programming, that is only tweaking. I, also, spent some time in the University of Abertay's grey, depressing walls being "taught" Visual Basic, and I well remember a young lassie of some 25 summers who could not even wrap her tongue round English vocables (being fluent - or mayhap 'effluent'- in gutter Dundonian Scots) asking me why her program did not work even though she had copied what the lecturer had "telt us"; and the answer was a simple as this:- You cannot teach programming by showing wains models and having them tweak them. Forbye, she did not understand what a FOR . . . NEXT LOOP was because the lecturer had provided a model with said loop in place and blethered something about repeating itself until it was finished. Now I teach programming to Primary Children; starting with ye olde fashioned flow-charts on ye olde fashioned black board and buttons and cups to demonstrate how A = A + 1 is possible. However, just like musicians; there are real pianists (that is why my older son practices 4-8 hours a day!) and Sunday-Afternoon-in-the-front-parlour pianists. Similarly with people who make computer programmers; however a Sunday-Afternoon-in-the-front-parlour pianist will never, never be a Vladimir Ashkenazy or a Daniel Barenboim. And anybody who tells wee Jimmy he can be a great piano player by doing half-an-hour a day and no Solfeggio, Theory or Harmony should be hit over the head with a brick! Now who is being abrasive? But, face it, the world is becoming mediocre, and Sunday-Afternoon-in-the-front-parlour pianists are being praised to the skies because they can belt out "The Flower of Scotland" without an ounce of feeling! I only wish I had the money and the time to attend the "Learn Programming in 1 Day" course, where, without trying in any way to be funny, I am quite sure I would learn a lot. And, further to that I would like to say that I think it is an awful pity that people seem to have taken my initial e-mail that initiated this series as an attack on the course as such, when it was merely meant as a 'poke' at the daft title it was given. I have nothing but admiration for Jacque and her colleagues, and their efforts. sincerely, Richmond Mathewson ____________________________________________________________ A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle. ____________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________ Rise to the challenge for Sport Relief with Yahoo! For Good http://uk.promotions.yahoo.com/forgood/ _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution