To School or Not To School?

A friend recently told me he will be starting school soon to learn web design, and I replied with an ’Uh Oh...’ and a lengthy explanation of why that may not be the best idea. The last time I checked, the schools teach tabular design, have no idea what usability is, and in general are teaching students skills that they will never really use in the real world, unless they are designing government websites (may not be a bad idea - http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/07/18m-being-spent-to-redesign-recoverygov-web-site.html).

The point is, while I wanted him to understand that I felt he would be better off finding books that go through Design, HTML/CSS, and Usability, I wanted to know how other people feel. It could be I feel better about books, but others had better experiences with school.

If someone was trying to get into the business now, with no background whatsoever, what route would you suggest they go through to learn all about the net and making it a nicer place?

I took a course through O’Reilly once, it was a dreadful waste of my money. I even contacted them with corrections to quite a few serious errors in their course material, but never got a response. All I got out of it was a certificate, and it wasn’t even a nice-looking one. In all six parts of the course, I had one question (involving a complex xsl structure) that was answered at all usefully. I found a more comprehensive answer online about 10 minutes later. Unfortunately I was delayed in getting started on the course, and by the time I realized how bad it really was it was too late for a refund.

SitePoint has been offering a number of fairly nice courses lately, with video, if learning on your own with the enormous selection of online tutorials doesn’t suit. I’ve taken a couple of them when they were offered at a special price, and while I didn’t actually learn anything new, they would be good for anyone who isn’t already an experienced web developer.

I’m completely self taught and to be honest wouldn’t do a college course as there out of date by the time they get to the class room, that said though they could be good as a starting point.

I’ve also used site point but only for buying books, they have a lot of great tutorials and books on offer so defiantly worth checking them out.

I have formal education in electronics engineering which provided a great foundation for my web programming career.

But I often catch my colleagues and clients off-guard when I say that I have been attending the University of Barnes & Noble for the past 8 years. The local B&N where I live also serves Starbucks, so the cost of class is a cup of joe

I really need to check out this University of Barns & Noble, granted in my case the University of Books a Million will likely be much closer.

I agree, (in my experience) colleges are behind the times when it comes to teaching web design. I have had classes where the teacher said you can’t build a website with a dropdown menu using PNGs that will work in every web browser. You must use tables, you must use javascript, and you must use jpg/gif. I then proceeded to prove her wrong by doing just that in my own time using online resources for help.

I had another class where the teacher considered using flash basic web design. If you asked her about coding a web site or the code in general, you would think I asked for $1k to burn or something. These classes all centered around iweb and dreamweaver, and fellow students often told me after the classes they would never do web design, as they didn’t feel they knew anything.

College is great in that you can get a degree saying you know something, but will you lean something useful and current? That’s a great question, I know I learned how to teach a web design class while taking it, so I guess in the long run I did learn something useful.

At the end of the day your college(s) may be different than mine, you may have great teachers, and it might be worth your time.

The University of Barnes & Noble - brilliant! I never thought of that! I just buy the books and then don’t read them . Other people have opinions? Any people that went to school in these forums? Please, speak up! The more opinions the better. I’m sure for every person trying to go into the business, this question comes up (or they don’t even realize that it should come up). At the very least, maybe the schools will start teaching proper web skills?

Any professors that teach Web Design here? Please, I’d love to hear other opinions! I’m planning on sharing this thread address with him...

There are a couple of problems with school-based computer education, IMO. One is that educators have long careers and don’t always keep up. When I was teaching myself C, the local colleges were teaching Pascal. When I was teaching myself C++, there were teaching -- wait for it -- Pascal. They caught up briefly when people were using Apple and IBM BASIC, but there literally no textbooks. When I was teaching myself ColdFusion, they were teaching C. I did take an excellent course in Visual BASIC, which turned out to be a good introduction to OOP (though I already knew C++ by that point). I suspect they’re still teaching that and it might still be worth taking, just to get your head around OOP. When I was teaching myself PHP, they were teaching C++.

I suspect that the Web design curriculum is similarly out of date.

Another problem is that Microsoft has marketed very well to colleges with packages that include the whole Visual/.net ball of wax. As a result, I suspect that a lot of students are learning .asp, which I don’t think is very useful these days.

I would say that if a good course in Object-Oriented PHP exists, it might be well worth taking, but I would investigate carefully before taking a course in Web design, because you might just be learning how to create a completely static web site -- something you could teach yourself in a very short time. Another extremely useful course for a web designer, IMO, would be Unix/Linux server management as would a good course in digital photography and/or PhotoShop.

Quote from: BobRay at May 29, 2011, 11:46 PM

Another problem is that Microsoft has marketed very well to colleges with packages that include the whole Visual/.net ball of wax. As a result, I suspect that a lot of students are learning .asp, which I don’t think is very useful these days.

Someone put me in touch with someone that graduated with a masters in computer architecture? Or something like that (for the purposes of helping us both out with sending work etc.) - basically he had spent years in school learning ASP.NET; so I got on the phone with him, and we were going through, and he said that’s what he works in. I told him, oooh, sorry, I don’t touch Microsoft, and PHP is so much better. He tried explaining to me why Microsoft is so good, and that he delved slightly into Java....I wasn’t very impressed.

MS is not that bad, but ASP is old, .NET on the other hand is quite a pleasure to work with.
And the templating engine who comes with it (Razor) is better that any template engine in PHP MODx included imo.

The dev tools are also very, very good.

But to stay on the topic, most of schools don’t use the last MS refinenents, so good technologies or not, they always stays on step (or often more) behind.

Quote from: lossendae at May 30, 2011, 10:15 AM

MS is not that bad, but ASP is old, .NET on the other hand is quite a pleasure to work with.
And the templating engine who comes with it (Razor) is better that any template engine in PHP MODx included imo.

The dev tools are also very, very good.

But to stay on the topic, most of schools don’t use the last MS refinenents, so good technologies or not, they always stays on step (or often more) behind.

I do usually preface anything I say against MS that I am very biased. Sorry, I should have included that earlier as well.