Hi! What's the best way to get back into programming now, if my skills are 'behind the curve'?

Question

I am a computer software test engineer, and in last 5 to 7 years have been assigned to job tasks that are less 'technical', or proprietary to my company . . i.e. related to specifically my company's electronic business vs. for instance, Microsoft skills.

Is best path to go back to school, specific technical courses, or online self-training?

Am interested in others' specific training plans, if they had to deal with same situation, please?

Was thinking of targeting Visual Studio 5.0, C#, ASP.NET, SQL Server . . . is that a good starting place? I need to be able to program and maintain 'test harness' code, most likely in C#, and possibly write other test automation code.

Would prefer answers from computing/IT professionals who have been in industry longer than 10 years please?

thanks, Mike B.

Answer 1

Well, my suggestion is to do what I do and that's to sit your *** down and start working on everything you need to catch up on and do it at home on your own time to start with, anyway. Oddly, I find that being self-taught (or self-updated!) seems to be one of the most effective ways to do this and you can start at work at a faster pace than if you'd not done anything at all but still learn much more when you start working on everything at your job again!! School takes far too long and you always end up needing that O.J.T. anyway!!!

Answer 2

Move to India. That's where all the jobs are going. Have you contacted tech support for ANY kind of software recently? How about Microsoft? Get ready for the most broken english speaking foreign individuals you've ever tried to communicate with. I've had to hang up on a few myself because you can't understand them.

Answer 3

Good training in SQL on SQL Exercises:

http://www.sql-ex.ru/

Answer 4

i would recommend Programming for Dummies....jk..all i know is javascript