Rochelle Hoffman

I went through these questions myself a couple of years ago. I have a BS in Pharmacy, and wanted to study towards a MS in CS. I wasn't sure what sort of transition this would be, and how much 'remedial' work I'd have to do before starting on the MS.
It turned out to not be so bad as expected. I surpassed the math requirements from what I had taken in my undergraduate work. Before being admitted to the MS program in my particular school, I had to complete intro programming (C), advanced programming (C++), data structures, compiler theory, and operating systems. I believe this is all, if memory serves me correctly.
Although I am still working towards the MS now, I am still working as a Pharmacist, due to the employment downturns. I enjoy the studies, and want to make it my future line of employment, but haven't felt strongly compelled to make the jump into seeking work yet.

I went through these questions myself a couple of years ago. I have a BS in Pharmacy, and wanted to study towards a MS in CS. I wasn't sure what sort of transition this would be, and how much 'remedial' work I'd have to do before starting on the MS.
It turned out to not be so bad as expected. I surpassed the math requirements from what I had taken in my undergraduate work. Before being admitted to the MS program in my particular school, I had to complete intro programming (C), advanced programming (C++), data structures, compiler theory, and operating systems. I believe this is all, if memory serves me correctly.
Although I am still working towards the MS now, I am still working as a Pharmacist, due to the employment downturns. I enjoy the studies, and want to make it my future line of employment, but haven't felt strongly compelled to make the jump into seeking work yet.

Ranch Dip! Yummy

Congrats John!
I have been following your story with interest and am glad that all has worked out so well for you. Plus the new job sounds like fun, and it's certainly nice that you can live whereever you want!

The one place on the Ranch where overuse of abbreviations (pls, hlp, u, ...) is common, and seems to be such a bad idea is in the Jobs Offered forum.
If I happened to be a potential employer reading through the replies to my job posting and saw them filled with all of these abbreviations, I would just ignore these replies outright. The writers might be wonderful coders, but I think in even an informal recruiting environment such as the Ranch that *some* formality of business communication would be appropriate.
I wouldn't apply for a job in which the recruiter wrote the job posting full of cute abbreviations, and I certainly wouldn't expect that a recruiter would reply to me if I wrote to them in that fashion.

James - you are not the only one. I haven't been able to see the topics listing since yesterday.
I do see where people are addng new posts, altho the volume doesn't seem to be as high as normal. So I am not sure if it is a general outage, or if it is isolated to just a few people.
(Maybe we're the only two!)
The Ranch also seems to be working more slowly than usual.

cedar

naugahyde

John Coxey- I'm sorry to hear of your job layoff in Denver. It's seems like I just read not too long ago that you had taken the new job.
Best wishes to you in your search. I'm usre it won't take long at all.
Rochelle Hoffman

spleen

Just to give a little bit more perspective of the salaries offered in this job "offering", at least from a Texas viewpoint.
My little brother works as a Java, C, and C++ programmer, with a little bit of SQL on the side, in the Dallas area. He got this job after completing *3* courses towards a MS - CompSci degree. One interview, easy as can be. He has a BS in Mech Engineering, and had worked testing jet engines for an aeronautics company prior to moving into programming.
Despite the lack of formal CS education, he makes about $75K yearly now, or about 3X what this ad offers.
Sooo.. as mentioned above, hopefully this guy was joking. Either that or just "testing the waters", albeit in a really extreme way.
And to think that I got excited about a great job being offered when I saw the number of replies to the original job posting! : )

I have looked at the D&D Java book, but haven't ever purchased it.
I think owning any *one* of the Deitels' books is great, since I think that they are able to explain complicated information in an easy-to-understand manner. I own 2 of their books presently,
C- How to Program, and C++ - How to Program. These were required books for a couple of my courses.
My only gripe with their books arises from the fact that the C++ book is largely a regurgitation of the C book, esp. in the earlier chapters. Many of the exercises also are duplicated between the books. I felt a little bit cheated after I bought the C++ book since it was so similar to the C book (with the exception of some of the more specific OOP details.)
So if you don't have any of the other D&D books, the Java edition would probably be a pretty good purchase. Otherwise, I like Just Java (as mentioned previously) and also the 2-volume Core Java set.

Oops, sorry about the name. I re-registered a while ago but forgot to use the new name when posting.