Poor job market at the moment. Cou 1

[theOMega]

Poor job market at the moment.
Could go into politics and try to change that but that s not in my field of interrest.
I am not a big pc dude and just playing around with pc soft and hardware since 1998.
I enjoy it and am really interrested in pc now.
Do it as a hobby not as a job but could imagine that.
If hobby or job what do you think one should learn on software, programming languages to let s say also run good with it in 10 to 20 years?
Hard question but there must be fields in which is a lot of potential.

Would be greatful for advice.

Omega

 

[jrbarnett]

Hi,

The PC market itself moves so fast that anything learned now in terms of operating systems, hardware etc will be outdated in 5 years time, let alone 10-20 (although if well built with good components, it will probably still work then).

For long term security which will make it easier to learn other areas in more depth:
* The structure of PC hardware, expansion slots, connectors etc.
* The windows 95 onwards user interface.
* The major command line commands (dir/copy/xcopy etc).
* General networking theory - getting multiple computers to communicate, ethernet/dial up; file and printer sharing, sharing internet connections etc.
* Structure of the registry and where major things are located.
* Linux/Unix type systems - command line, security, configuration, user access rights etc.

For programming/development, I think it may move even faster than hardware/operating systems. However, at the moment the following are useful for business applications:
* Object oriented programming principles (try implementing something in a fully oo language - NOT VB/VBA; it doesn't support everything).
* Java/J2EE, .Net/C# are the current big things, but no idea how long they will last.
* Relational database theory and ANSI SQL which shouldn't be too difficult to port to other DBMS's.

If however you are more into developing utility applications or games, C++ would be a better language to learn, and for games/multimedia applications, DirectX and OpenGL are useful.

John