[Courses] [Careers] Carla the Country Geek

[Jon Drews]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 09:54:40 -0500, Julie Sloan
<juliesloan at mindspring.com> wrote:
> ||svaksha|| wrote:
> > On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 18:20:03 -0800, Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> wrote:
> >
> >>Degrees v. free-style
> >>http://www.computerbits.com/archive/1999/0700/carla9907.html
> >>"There will forever be strife between people who favor structured education,
> >>degrees, certifications, licenses, and the like, and them awful mavericks who
> >>insist on doing things their own way, in their own time; between those who
> >>pursue a profession for money and prestige, and those who do it because they
> >>love it."

 The biggest tragedy is you pay big buck$ to be taught by grad
students who have little time to prepare or by professors who really
could care less about doing a good job on expounding the material. The
truth is that most of the university faculty do really sloppy work. In
a graduate chem course, I had a textbook that had over 550 mistakes in
it. They had been in it (according to the errata at the publishers
site) for two reprintings. In the end, you really teach yourself. The
professors were more interested in knowledge for it's prestige value
(publications that no one will read); what I wanted was know-how.

> It's practically impossible to get recognition from the big publishing
> houses without being connected with some University's Master of Fine
> Arts program.  My point is, this isn't a CS-specific problem, and for
> sure not gender-specific.

 I guess O'Reilly isn't that way though? I think No Starch Press has
some good titles and they aren't a fan of credentialism.