At the age of 16 I went to a sixth form college that had a computing course. Naturally, I was interested in computers from a really early age so I took it up.
On the induction day, we were taught to make a slot machine program in Visual Basic 6.0. It wasn't advanced at all - you click the button and it would randomly generate 3 images using VB's Random and there were rules to implement like if the 3 images matched and they were all oranges, give X amounts of credits etc.
I absolutely loved that and when I went home I basically pirated a copy of VB6 and just tried to code anything that I could possibly think of. At the time it was just simple buttons that would open up Control Panel to defeat the college's computer security and whatnot, but that's where I really bit my teeth into programming.
I then went to university to do Computer Science and it made me realise that the field is pretty diverse, but I'd also say that in the real world only my first year lectures applied to the real world.
Some stuff was irrellevant (Graphics course), some of the courses were poorly explained (Networking course), and some courses were obsolete by the time I entered the real world (Databases course banging on about MySQL - when I started my job we were using Postgres).
Some courses were so painfully outdated that it was actually wrong (thanks Concurrency course - luckily Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz set me straight).
While I'm glad I went to university to help me get my foot in the door, I really don't think it's necessary at all or even advisable, especially if you are in the UK as the tuition fees are basically extortion. I'd advise newcomers to look into apprentice roles where they can learn on the job and get paid instead.
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At the age of 16 I went to a sixth form college that had a computing course. Naturally, I was interested in computers from a really early age so I took it up.
On the induction day, we were taught to make a slot machine program in Visual Basic 6.0. It wasn't advanced at all - you click the button and it would randomly generate 3 images using VB's Random and there were rules to implement like if the 3 images matched and they were all oranges, give X amounts of credits etc.
I absolutely loved that and when I went home I basically pirated a copy of VB6 and just tried to code anything that I could possibly think of. At the time it was just simple buttons that would open up Control Panel to defeat the college's computer security and whatnot, but that's where I really bit my teeth into programming.
I then went to university to do Computer Science and it made me realise that the field is pretty diverse, but I'd also say that in the real world only my first year lectures applied to the real world.
Some stuff was irrellevant (Graphics course), some of the courses were poorly explained (Networking course), and some courses were obsolete by the time I entered the real world (Databases course banging on about MySQL - when I started my job we were using Postgres).
Some courses were so painfully outdated that it was actually wrong (thanks Concurrency course - luckily Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz set me straight).
While I'm glad I went to university to help me get my foot in the door, I really don't think it's necessary at all or even advisable, especially if you are in the UK as the tuition fees are basically extortion. I'd advise newcomers to look into apprentice roles where they can learn on the job and get paid instead.