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Numero Uno: get a job. Get more experience in the real world.

How best to do that?

Well, you are lucky in that the job market is pretty good for tech skills. Companies would like to hire more experienced people, but can't always find them. Put your resume together as well as you can and prep for interviews by Googling potential questions and working on them.

Better yet, if you know anyone in IT, have them grill you.

If you are going for a programming job, make sure that you know and can apply basic procedural program concepts such as working with arrays, lists, queues, stacks, iteration, and recursion. Understand the basics of object oriented design. Write programs to practice these things. Find a good CS course online and do the homework.

Wrox's Programming Interviews Exposed is great practice for programming interviews.

If you want to move up, learn more advanced algorithms concepts.

If you are going for a sys admin job, install Linux on your home machine and manually manage it. Ubuntu is great, but learn about partition, booting, permissions, sudo privileges. A Linux admin handbook can teach you a lot.

Don't sweat the philosophy degree.

I do a lot of interviewing/hiring technical types, and have no problem with an non tech degree. Just know your shit.

I thought it was, unless you compile it with the unsafe options and use the unsafe features, the C++/CLI language is verifiable.

From wrox press:
The compiler does, however, support compilation options to restrict programs to a verifiable subset of the language

I know that pimping one's own stuff is severely looked down upon here, but I actually do a pretty good job of pointing out the caveats in my AJAX chapter in Professional LAMP by Wrox/Wiley, just released a few days ago. I also point out the likeness of AJAX misuses to the misuses of Flash.

Basically, there is a lot of hype because that's what gets out first. Books don't really create hype. Articles and articles about articles create hype. These have quick turnaround, so they get out first. Then you get a wave of articles about the other side. It takes more room to talk about both sides, and this usually happens in books, which have a much longer production cycle.

In other words, I think we're definitely over the crest of the hype wave. Now we can get onto actually using AJAX for useful things.

Burn, karma! Burn! (At least I didn't post the amazon link with my associate code, which I've seen many fellow pimps do.)

Many Linux programming books actually already contain most of the content of these kind of books including Wrox's "Beginning Linux Programming" by Richard Stones and Neil Matthew. You can find the book's webpage here. A very good text to get you started in Unix programming.

The above was moderated Flamebait, and it was retarded, but I do agree with the poster about the lack of valuable information in O'Reilly books. Their books tend to be poorly organized, short on good examples (with good explanations), and long on the author's "expert" comments on the specific subject. At times I've had to set an O'Reily book down simply because I felt the author was trying to impress me with his knowledge instead of teach me the subject.

I've read several O'Reilly books about Java, HTML, DHTML, JS, CSS, etc. I have been impressed with none of them. Each one of them was a "definitive guide" (except the Java book; I believe it was a "nutshell" book), but ended up looking elsewhere for good learning resources. I ended up simply going to the internet to find good tutorials on web dev. I like echoecho.com for simple/beginner HTML. I liked the CSS spec for CSS, Ivor Horton's Beginning Java for Java. There are several good DHTML tutorials at the W3C website.

"Holy shit, go look at a job site. You are actually more likely to make much, much more. Seriously, go to a google site. I know people from/in China. They are programmers or business man who hire programmers. They all make good money, especially for the cost of living. It would be equivalent to about $55K a year, and a quick job search in a few places will confirm that you are full of shit. Feel free to provide some facts for the bullshit numbers you spew in the future, it actually helps your argument."
Here's some real world statistics. And as far as providing some facts for bullshit statistics, I'd suggest you take your own advice. 3/5 of my development team is from China, and they all made $200 a month when they moved here 1998. You're correct in that the cost of living is quite low in china. That happens when 98% of the population lives in poverty.

"Yes, and you know, since we're talking about high-wage work it's completely relevant."

No we're not talking about high-wage work. We're talking about all types of work from all sectors of industry. Again you show that you do not possess any sort of critical thinking capacity. The high wage work is the project manager (me) and the low wage work is the peon visual basic programmer or the entry level tech support (you).

"Wow, you are so amazingly wrong, and apparently know this, and are attempting to salvage some sort of dignity here by bringing in sad memories of sweat shops and compare those to current development and tech support industries located out of the US?"

That was a very poor attempt at dodging the issue. Aside from that, sweatshops aren't memories for the chinese. Just because MSNBC stopped focusing on the Kathie Lee scandal doesn't mean sweatshops went away. You take the position that because you don't see or hear about them, they must not exist. Put your head back in the sand, ostrich, the real world is too scary for you.

"You have just proven yourself inadequate in this discussion past any reasonable doubt I already had."

There has been no discussion from your side. You've done nothing but hide from the facts with irrelevant scenarios and non-sensical arguments. You don't have a basic understanding of economics, politics, or humanities.

"
Let me break it down to you again: You don't like it because you think America is some fantastic land of opportunity that nobody else should share the same quality of life because you feel your own life will be put in jeopardy because of it. You are a selfish fuck. Your comments about the US market being the most lucrative is because of fucks like you, who think that the only country that should have the same lifestyle as you, is the US and all other countries should be made to suffer because of your greed."

This is exactly what I mean when I say you are stupid. You can't even understand a signle, simple point. You are so ignorantly and incorrectly bent on this idea that I want to protect jobs from "them damn foreigners" you can't or won't actually understand what you read. My argument the whole time was not that I was against globalization. You are too stupid to see that. I was arguing that this is double standard globalization, the corporations are protected, but the people are not. If you're going to open up jobs to other countries without penalty, you need to open up trade with other countries without penalty. If you're going to tax imported goods, you need to tax exported jobs. You still haven't addressed that simple issue. So in your next psychotic rant, I'd like you to justify to me how this is globalization. Try focusing on what I say, and not the twisted, delusional ideas resulting from an obviously fucked up thought process.

"It doesn't matter, because the rules of economics are against you. You apparently only got a neat story out of A Beautiful Mind instead of actually understanding Nash's Equilibrium, because that is what this is."

Actually

Creating an association directory using XML markup and MySQL

Creating a web forum using PHP with MySQL and PEAR::DB

Building a PDA/Wireless store directory application using PHPLib

Creating a job board using PHP, WML, MySQL, and Smarty

Building a news service using PHP, MySQL, and Smarty

Creating a web corpus using simple PHP scripts

Building a classified ads board using PHP with MySQL, and Smarty

Building content management systems using PHP, MySQL, and XML

Building a search engine for dynamic sites PHP, MySQL, and PHPLib

Building a three-tier, multi-client, wireless data warehousing application

Creating a PHP/MySQL based data repository

Building a robust site architecture using the PostNuke CMS

Well then can you recommend some non-bias .NET books?

To be honest, I can't--I don't use .NET and haven't had a need to read about it in-depth. I was making more of a general comment about understanding the backgrounds of authors before deciding whether they'll be reasonably objective about their subject matter.

Obviously, anyone who writes a good book on any subject needs to be an expert of the same--and I doubt someone who isn't at least favorable towards a given technology will be motivated to write about it. (I note that one of the co-authors of the O'Reilly book C# Essentials, for instance, is an engineer at Microsoft. And Programming Perl might be far less useful if Larry Wall hadn't had a hand in writing it.)

Having said that, I think you can peruse books from certain "independent" publishers with a fair amount of confidence that its authors aren't simply shills for their favorite technology vendor. O'Reilly, IMO, publishes the best tech books in the business, and I've never come across one that sounds like an extended marketing brochure. I also have had good luck with Wrox titles. As always, YMMV.

I bought Beginning JSP Web Development from Wrox and it has eight authors and is 852 pages. That's about 106 pages per author. Sure having that many people working on it can speed up the process but in this case it made the book terrible imho. Each chapter used a slightly different writing style and in some of the chapters even the sample code was in a different style. Most of the chapters didn't really build upon the previous chapter, they all could have been their own little books. It seemed like the authors decided who would cover what and then didn't talk to one another until the book was done. There were a couple of instances where the sample code would use the @page directive and the chapter had never explained what it was. And it wasn't explained for several chapters.

Anyways I wouldn't recommend this book to others and I would be weary of other books from Wrox and other publishers that had a ton of Authors (Wrox's Professional JSP has 22 authors and is only 936 pages!).

-Sam

I bought Beginning JSP Web Development from Wrox and it has eight authors and is 852 pages. That's about 106 pages per author. Sure having that many people working on it can speed up the process but in this case it made the book terrible imho. Each chapter used a slightly different writing style and in some of the chapters even the sample code was in a different style. Most of the chapters didn't really build upon the previous chapter, they all could have been their own little books. It seemed like the authors decided who would cover what and then didn't talk to one another until the book was done. There were a couple of instances where the sample code would use the @page directive and the chapter had never explained what it was. And it wasn't explained for several chapters.

Anyways I wouldn't recommend this book to others and I would be weary of other books from Wrox and other publishers that had a ton of Authors (Wrox's Professional JSP has 22 authors and is only 936 pages!).

-Sam

WROX Press book:Beginning Linux Programming" by Richard Stones and Neil Matthew
A very good no non-sense introduction book about programming in Linux.

I have found wrox press books to be good. They don't publish any of the "classic" books (for instance k&r c) but their stuff seems to be accurate and very well layed out. I find them the easiest to learn from by far.

I checked out WROX's Professional PHP4. It had everything I wanted to do... create an email and news clients. It deals how to make an FTP client. It talks about use with MySQL and PostgreSQL. I found it rather helpful (along with php.net's documentation and user notes). Bah, here's an overview.

Wrox Press have an Early Adopter J2SE 1.4 book out now, and it's got some good reviews at Amazon...

I was quite disappointed when I browsed through later books they published. They certainly didn't live up to the one I bought.

I heartily agree - I definitely recommend visiting the Wrox forums if you're interested in any of the subject areas their books cover. They do have a slight Microsoft bias in terms of available forums, but there's a fair few Linux-related ones too.

The Beginning Java 2 book is pretty good in my opinion - if not for the content, then for the community support site at p2p.wrox.com. Remember, don't judge a book by it's cover, especially a Wrox book ;)

This sounds to me like a "shovelware" book, albeit too late to have any impact on anything other then the trees that died to print it. Do they pay the authors of these tomes by the pound?

I wrote some of Professional Oracle 8i Application Programming, and was paid by the page.

The fact of the matter is anything Unix programming related or C related has been done already and done well. These attempts to cash in by vendors like WROX (and their ilk, like QUE) by slapping "Linux" on the cover are just that, attempts to cash in.

Unix and C, perhaps, but there are all the layered products to consider also.

Am I alone in thinking Wrox generaly sucks? Their Beginning Java 2 book was used in my Java course last year. The book is OK if you're just learning Java, but is almost useless as a referance (possibly because they want you to buy the referance as a seperate book). Don't get me started on that Ivor Horton guy (aka, "Evil Horn").

Am I alone in thinking Wrox generaly sucks? Their Beginning Java 2 book was used in my Java course last year. The book is OK if you're just learning Java, but is almost useless as a referance (possibly because they want you to buy the referance as a seperate book). Don't get me started on that Ivor Horton guy (aka, "Evil Horn").

Read about it here

What you need to do is to turn PHP Safe Mode on (in the PHP configuration file). Maybe you didn't find this because documentation isn't very clear on the topic. Look for safe mode in php.net, maybe this link is also useful:
http://www.wrox.com/Consumer/Store/Books/2963/2963 2002.htm

Using Safe Mode

Running PHP in safe mode is a great way of making the use of PHP scripts safer, especially if you allow users to develop and run their own PHP scripts. Turning on safe mode will cause PHP to check a number of this before executing functions that could possibly be a security risk.

Me too. They misspelled my name on the cover and still haven't paid me!

This is a good sources book which covers a lot of examples in JSP and servlet.

Besides, if you want to study Java, JSP and servlet from the ground up, Wrox's Java Server programming and Professional JSP are pretty good books.

This is a good sources book which covers a lot of examples in JSP and servlet.

Besides, if you want to study Java, JSP and servlet from the ground up, Wrox's Java Server programming and Professional JSP are pretty good books.

This is a good sources book which covers a lot of examples in JSP and servlet.

Besides, if you want to study Java, JSP and servlet from the ground up, Wrox's Java Server programming and Professional JSP are pretty good books.

Other folks have mentioned Thinking in Java, so I won't link it. While it's a damn good book, I liked Ivor Horton's Beginning Java a little better for newbies, since it doesn't focus quite as much on object orientation. I don't have the new edition, though I would expect the same high quality. Of course, Fatbrain has it. Wrox is my second favorite tech publisher after O'Reilly. Still, you can't beat a free book, so I'd at least check out the online version of Thinking.

Other folks have mentioned Thinking in Java, so I won't link it. While it's a damn good book, I liked Ivor Horton's Beginning Java a little better for newbies, since it doesn't focus quite as much on object orientation. I don't have the new edition, though I would expect the same high quality. Of course, Fatbrain has it. Wrox is my second favorite tech publisher after O'Reilly. Still, you can't beat a free book, so I'd at least check out the online version of Thinking.

Other folks have mentioned Thinking in Java, so I won't link it. While it's a damn good book, I liked Ivor Horton's Beginning Java a little better for newbies, since it doesn't focus quite as much on object orientation. I don't have the new edition, though I would expect the same high quality. Of course, Fatbrain has it. Wrox is my second favorite tech publisher after O'Reilly. Still, you can't beat a free book, so I'd at least check out the online version of Thinking.