It all started last summer when I applied for a data analysis intern position. Turns out it was a C#/.NET Developer internship, after all. Well, I had experience in C,C++,and Java, and apparently could code. I got up to speed on C# pretty quickly, and found myself in the middle of a team of developers. This was unlike anything I'd done at home.
I run a Web server, dallying here and there. I use Linux. I run make. I hack existing source. I try examples. I make small applications. But here I was on a multi-year, multi-phase project, incorporating management, testers, developers, and database folks.
But now I want to know more. More specifically:
- I am very comfortable with C# 2, .NET Framework 2.0 now. I want to learn and use the new features of C# 3.0, .NET Framework 3.5, and the upcoming Framework/C# 4.0
- I want to relearn a lot of C++ and Java. I think I'm better at C than I am at C++.
- Perl. 'Nuf said.
- Python. Ditto.
- Databases. Here we go. We write for an Oracle database on the project at work currently, but I want to approach more-than-writing-custom-embedded-sql to less-than-a-dba levels of knowledge. I want to try implementing solutions to a problem in (MS) SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and others (Firebird, umm... there are a few more, but I think after that I just need SQL compliance)
- Web applications. I've written some SOAP Web services in .NET by now, and they seem ok. But my exposure to full on stateful Web applications is quite limited. And I want to learn it without using PHP. PHP would be good to know, but I just don't think it's a great language. Just because PHP and MySQL are ubiquitous, does not mean that I need to use them. I want to learn memcached, and FastCGI, on Apache httpd and MS IIS.
