Student - Career Advice

Hi,

My name is Shuaib Latif, I am 17 years of age, and I am currently studying at college and I am looking to work towards building a solid career in software development. In the long-term I wish to become a technical large-scale software developer.

In the recent weeks, I have been undertaking an immense amount of research in software development. I have read about the various phases of software development including analysis and design, implementation and testing. I wish to work primarily in application implementation (writing applications) and, object-oriented analysis and design. I have looked at the programming languages and developments that are ‘hot’ today, and I have no idea where to run. There all sort’s including C, C++, Java and even the new .NET framework. I have been programming with Visual Basic 6 for over four years now, but I wish to work towards building a solid skill-set so when I come to find a job, I have a very good chance of working at the forefront of developing large-scale database or technical applications.

I have tried looking for jobs recently as a part-time VB6 junior coder, but all the companies seem to ask for many years of experience. At the moment, I can't get my 'foot in the door', and without working there's no chance of gaining experience. My current skill-set includes Visual Basic 6, ADO, DAO, SQL and SQL Server database applications.

Is it worth taking my time to learn C, C++, Visual C++ and Java?, or could I possibly plunge stright into the .NET framework and look into Visual C# .NET?

Can anyone give me a structured approach to which language to learn and what areas are possibly hot to work in, and how to get into a part-time job to get solid experience with my current skills?

Thanks

You should learn how all languages work, without necessarely be proficient with all of them. Know the object oriented paradigm, functional programming, procedural programming etc. thereafter, whenever you need to do something, you can consider which language is more appropriate to the specific project.

As for getting a job, start by a small personal project. The employers like to see personal projects as it shows you have initiative.

Good luck!

I agree with what Martin said.

If you want to get into .NET, get into VB.NET first. Will be easier for you as you already are familiar with VB 6.0.