Career advice

[wyld]

Due to a lay-off, I've taken a long look at my skill set and have realized it needs to be improved dramatically. Now, the question is how to accomplish that.

Here's a little background.
- Most of my programming experience (over 10 years) is in COBOL.
- Most recently, I was programming in a proprietary language (ADP Basic).
- I also have experience in analysis, dealing with clients (internal and external), and project management.

In my current job, I'll be using:
- Access (have a beginner's knowledge)
- Perl (know nothing about this)
- DB/C (know nothing about this; will be taking a 3-day training class)
- Monarch (have a beginner's knowledge)

Any recommendations on training/education/reading for Access, Perl, DB/C, or Monarch?

Any recommendations on any other skills to pick up?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Smack]

Wyld, I am basically self taught in the use of Access (I took classes 1-3 at a local CC, but had pretty much figured out the next lessons by the time I took the class)I know no programming languages, so if I can do it - it should be easy for you! The Northwind examples in the office suite (All references from me are 97, not 2000.) is good for learning, you can also look at the other example databases in design view to help figgure out how they did things. Currently I use the Access Bible for all references, mainly because my employer purchased it for me. I just recently, and fortunately found tech-tips, man this is a great tool. The two things that really impede my abilities is not knowing SQL or VBA. I hope to take a VBA class in the next couple of months. Once again, since you already have programming skills, this stuff should come much easier to you. Other than that, you just got to work it! Will you be creating new programs, or working with existing ones?
Any way, good luck, and I share your pain with you in advance,
-Smack

 

[wyld]

Thanks, Smack. I'm not too worried about Access. I'll be setting up new databases, tables, queries, etc. Although, I do have an existing database that I'll be maintaining. I have to make some changes to it but after that, it'll be pretty stable.

I'm trying to determine what direction to go with updating my skill set. I'm feeling obsolete and want to change that. *s*

 

[carp]

O'Reilly has a book called "Learning Perl" that is very popular with the Perl programmers in our shop. They feel it's an excellent companion to O'Reilly's "Programming Perl", which they swear is THE reference of choice for them.

Another person has recommended Elizabeth Castro's "Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web" (Peachpit Press) to me as a great "jump start" book.

 

[SheRa]

Hehe..

I just finished doing a University course which used both those books.

O'Reilly's Programming is phenomenal, and "P&C for the

http://WWW"

is a great little picture book that lets you get started immediately. Perl isn't really that hard to learn, and before you know it, you'll be building really neat scripts. Seems to me that with a little bit of reference material, and some background programming experience, jumping languages isn't too tough. Just a matter of knowing that in perl, the else if is spelled 'elsif'. Stuff like that.

As for Access, I learned it, and created a neat little database for my employer last summer, all in under three weeks. And that was only working on it two days a week. So six days. I had no db experience before working with it. I just kind of played around with it (which I find is the best way to learn), and harassed people on this site.

X-)

 

[Armstrong]

There is an excellent website that features code that you can learn from. Go to

http://cwashington.netreach.net/main_site/default.asp?topic=news

The site is ran by Clarence Washington. It is an excellent repository for all script and script related items. With a little searching you can find tutorials, Integrated Development Environments, etc.

Good Luck, hope this helps!
Greg

 

[SATech]

...as for Monarch, it's an extremely effective tool for taking flat files and extracting the data YOU select and exporting into any one of several usable formats. Access .mdb format is my format of choice, as you can pretty much do anything with it from within Access.

Don't worry about classes or outside materials for Monarch, as the manual that ships with it is more than enough to make you a pro at it after a couple of good study/ojt nights. ________
S. Joseph Vergara
SVergara@Texas.net