Learning DotNet

As an experienced developer, colleagues looking to get into the field often ask me how I "learned to program". I did take formal classes at junior college and university, and to some extent my experience was sort of vaguely finding my path into jobs that required me to pick up Access, and later Visual Basic, FoxPro, and start using it.

The other area that really filled in the gaps between theory and trial and error for me was an online education site called 'ZDU'. The site isn't around anymore, or at least not in the form it was then, but one of the authors/instructors, John Smiley, that taught in that format now accompanies his own books with internet classes through his website, http://www.johnsmiley.com.

I learned from him back on VB 5, then VB 6 (I still have a number of his spiral bound ZDU 'workbooks' on the shelf) Reading the abstracts of his current books, of course updated for .net 2.0, 3.0, etc. and expanded to VB.net and C#, it appears to follow a similar format that I highly recommend. Mr. Smiley takes you from the beginning of a fictional project, that gets built out chapter-by-chapter to a finished product at the end. I really like the format as it tends to follow how I develop applications in the real world. I highly recommend his books, and his internet classes, to someone looking to learn to program and wants to focus on the Microsoft Dot Net product.

Take a look at his classes or books