Or perhaps I should be saying that compiled free information should not be bundled as expert advice.

You know, I am not entirely sure what I am trying to say.  I will just note my opinions and what sparked the post.

The awesome Killer Tech Tips site is offering a book by Daniel Scocco called Killer Domains.

I have no clue about the quality or value of the material Daniel covers.  This book could be amazing above all others in its domain (no pun intended).

However, from the brief post about it I was left thinking, “Couldn’t I find most of this information on the Internet?”

• The process of researching domain names — is that not a business or marketing responsibility?
• Keyword research is useless in the choice of domain names as it relates to a business model.
• Prefixes and suffixes — this one in particular gave me the “prey” feeling. Such simplistic information should not be paid for.
• Prefixes — the easiest thing to remember is that ANYTHING dot YOURDOMAIN dot SUFFIX is a sub-domain.  That is right.  Even the WWW.
• Suffix — look up any TLD on Wikipedia or another good search engine.

Granted this was a generalized and compacted subsection of Daniel’s book, but it just seemed extremely lackluster.

Not to mention I have been wanting to gripe about people purchasing information that is generally considered publicly available and free.

And if you are doing things the wrong way on purpose, well, then you are an idiot.

This came to me while reading another of Veerle’s expert posts and having just visited Digital FAQ.

I will start with the “offending” site. I say that loosely because at least it is not a site about how to properly use markup, or something similar. Digital FAQ is an excellent resource and should not be considered anything but that. So take my critique of one small flaw as that — a critique of one small flaw.

When you visit the site you immediately see “Site optimized for Internet Explorer and 1024×768 resolution.”

There is so much wrong with that mentality it is hard to know where to start. However, the first thing that comes to mind is that there are several more browsers than Internet Explorer. Not only are there several other browsers but a few of them are considered mainstream!

No smart web designer, developer, or architect would design a system that accommodated only the most popular perceived browser. I say perceived because it is simply not the most popular browser anymore.

Before you go throwing browser statistics and usage pattern numbers at me, let me clarify.

There are browsers out there that mystify, confuse, or just plain cause people headaches. My mother is one of them. Just looking at Firefox or Opera begins to confuse her and fill her with questions.

As power users we may look and see instant similarities — but the average user does not. One of the number one complaints I hear from Internet Explorer users is that they simply do not like it for whatever reasons, but they do not have the time to invest in learning something else.

This does not sound like a popular alternative but one that is forced upon people by convenience.

Now if you would like to dig out the numbers make sure to think about what I have said. So when you see that there are several alternative browsers that are steadily gaining in “popularity,” know that is only the story you hear, only the numbers that get sampled, and only those users who are willing to put forth the effort to learning and utilize something better.

Having said ALL this, do I really need to discuss different resolutions? Different sized displays? I will refrain, but the numbers in all these situations are evident. No statistics and fact sheets are needed.

Stay away from designing for one browser or resolution. It is quite simply put the wrong thing to do. Therefore knowing that and continuing to do it makes you or anyone else an idiot.

Wait a minute, I was supposed to not be so harsh. Well, let me explain that bit too. You have created a website or page for 2 reasons:

1. You want someone to share in the information you have.  Take part in its discovery.  Et cetera.
2. You must make a living off of what you create.

So you see whether or not you are doing something for a personal site or for something professional you really need to be open to allowing the web to be traversed freely if not expertly.  By that I mean achieving the widest possible audience.

Don’t get me wrong now.  If you are throwing some stuff together for you and a few members of your family to view, then so be it.  But anything beyond that is a futile and inefficient endeavor.

This brings me to my final point.  Start off on the right foot!  If you have already begun learning ineffective and haphazard methodologies, well, stop!  It is fairly straightforward — STOP!

So I invite you to Google these terms and definitely check out Veerle’s post on this matter, because she very swiftly and with precision lays out several key terms, books, and ideas for you.

Terms to Google:

1. Web Standards
2. Semantic markup
3. CSS shorthand

And know that the W3C is quite literally the authoratative source on all things semantic web and web standards.  However, if you are like me, you will have a difficult time absorbing the material there (highly technical at times).

Therefore, feel free to peruse other sources.  Just make sure the focus is on one thing and that is the three main terms presented above.

If you are going to take down a link — LET ME KNOW!

Yesterday I visited http://www.waldenu.edu/c/10909.htm to check if they had any online Information Technology courses.  I found http://www.waldenu.edu/c/Schools/Schools_13788.htm, which was supposed to lead to “B.S. in Computer Information Systems.”  Instead I was presented with a 404 page.

And of course today the link on the “10909″ page is now gone. If we view the source of that page we see the link is there — it is just commented out.

If you are smart enough to design applications that notify you of problems you should be just as smart in notifying your users.

Tell me that the link is temporarily unavailable.  Better yet, tell me when it is coming back online or where I can find the information in the meantime.

Walden University has lost out on a student simply because I am unwilling to check back every day to check for links that have magically disappeared.

NOTE:  As of May 20th, 2008 the Walden University llink finally reappeared.

Yes way!

During my class last night StudentA (for some strange reason) stroked the professor’s ego by saying that he should have wrote the book, upon which the professor replied:

Student A: They should have just paid you to write the text
Professor: (I have my own C# text out there Student A)

Upon reviewing the class transcript I see that it was because the idea behind the “static” keyword finally sunk in for Student A. It was then that they fully understood why you call:

System.Console.WriteLine();

By prefixing the WriteLine method with Console, rather than instantiating an object of the Console class.

For this a student gushes about how well the professor is teaching? That he should have wrote the book? All he did was explain how static works!

*sigh*

I feel really bad because if this is your last term as a programmer, then you should have been through 3 courses in either VB or Java here. Which means then you really should already have the knowledge base for this course – you just don’t have the C# syntax (which is nearly identical to Java). Honestly, you’re the bulk of the reason why I’ve added in these ‘extra’ programs – because I think everyone else is going to be having a tough enough time with the regular projects. Hopefully I’ll be wrong about that, but having taught this course more than a few times, that’s just been my experience.

Yeah, you heard that right. He feels bad because I should have had previous programming classes to prepare me for this course. Granted, I did have an Introduction to Programming about a year ago, but it was basically a “how to use Visio” course. It didn’t teach anything worthwhile (unless you consider Visio that worthwhile).

So, I decide to continue to push my understanding of the language and ask about assemblies, specifically this (in a discussion board thread that he previously ignored):

ME

I didn’t see a necessity to pollute the global namespace with a using directive for one qualification.

And I’ll be honest, I have no absolute clue that it would pollute the “global namespace.” That is basically a carry-over from my work in client-side programming and memory resident applications that would normally suffer greatly the more you “polluted” the memory allocation.

Well, PROFESSOR? Does it increase memory whatsoever? I’m going to say, “No.” It probably doesn’t because this is a compiled language, then again, I’ve no clue how it may poll the framework. It might request that System be looked up each and every time the program runs or it may statically link in some information pertaining to the specific calls it requires. I have ZERO clue how assemblies are resolved.

PROFESSOR

For this course, it’s quite appropriate to have a ‘using statement’ even if you only use that reference one time – in fact, it’s nearly expected. For example, it’s fine to have:

using System;

public class TestMe {
public static void Main() {
Console.WriteLine("hello");
}
}

The rest of the discussion here is well beyond the scope of this course.

Say what?! How in the world did that answer ANYTHING I said?! In fact, the response didn’t even make sense.

And if that simple bit of information is outside of the scope of this course, yet it is supposed to be the 4th in a series of programming courses offered — WHEN exactly would it be in scope?

I am convinced my professor is an idiot.

Oops, almost forgot the nitpicking. I purposely did the wrong exercise to see how it would be handled (it was an extra, nothing against my grade) and this was his response:

PROFESSOR

The problem that I see in the text says:

“Show the output for each of the following data types: …”

The program code that I see here has 3 ints, a float and a double. It does some math and then outputs a single value (the double).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now, was this first problem a real-world problem? Certainly not. It was quite abstract – BUT – it does bring up a great point. And this was something that I mentioned near the end of our first meeting together:

“The thing that folks tend to lose the most points for in this class is for not following directions.”

And while the problem itself might not be ‘real world’, following directions is definitely something that’s about as real world as it gets. I have this long, drawn out story that I tell to seated students about working your first job.

The short version is that your boss says they have a big client who wants a spreadsheet program. You want to impress your boss so you add all these extra features. At the end, you have a program that’s the best word processor EVER. It’s going to put Word out of business. The problem is – your client wanted a spreadsheet and you end up getting fired.

Ok… a little unrealistic, but the point is that reading and following directions is critical for a programmer. After all, what does a programmer do for a living? They write instructions for a machine.

Again, I feel bad posting this here — hey, you’ve taken the time out of your life to write an extra program. However, this is really part of the reason why I’ve created these ‘extras’. Because there’s so much to learn and really the best way to find out is to actually write a program and then get feedback on it.

Overall, I think it’s wonderful that you were able to get this program working — but I’ll challenge you to try to slow down a bit and pay close attention to what the problem is stating. This is going to be critical in your Projects this term as I’ll always grade based on the Project specs.

Thanks!

ME

Thanks for that lengthy response — I think.

I am worried about something small — I’m not sure if it was the fact that I did the wrong exercise, or the fact that you didn’t catch it.

PROFESSOR

Well, to be fair to myself, I do not have 100% complete knowledge of every single problem that is written in this textbook.

I sincerely apologize for not being better at catching the fact that you did a different problem.

All of my comments still apply to everyone though. Reading and following directions is critical.

Um… to be fair to me should I not have a competent professor in the field I’m studying? Why do I have to have the Gomer Pyle of C#?

So, I post the right exercise:

…
2. “Initialize each variable with an appropriate test value.”

I figured this meant no values outside of the types natural range. So I pushed the limit and casted a float value to my integer variable. (Just because I wanted to use 12345.12345 in each example. I know… silly…)

namespace IT254_01_Unit2_Extra
{
	class Program
	{
		static void Main()
		{
			int varInteger = (int) 12345.12345; // casting so I can use 12345.12345
			float varFloat = 12345.12345F; // no implicit conversions
			double varDouble = 12345.12345;
			decimal varDecimal = 12345.12345M; // no implicit conversions

			Console.WriteLine("\r\nFormatted with 0 digits:");
			Console.WriteLine("varInteger:\t{0:C0}", varInteger);
			Console.WriteLine("varFloat:\t{0:C0}", varFloat);
			Console.WriteLine("varDouble:\t{0:C0}", varDouble);
			Console.WriteLine("varDecimal:\t{0:C0}", varDecimal);

			Console.WriteLine("\r\nFormatted with 2 digits:");
			Console.WriteLine("varInteger:\t{0:C2}", varInteger);
			Console.WriteLine("varFloat:\t{0:C2}", varFloat);
			Console.WriteLine("varDouble:\t{0:C2}", varDouble);
			Console.WriteLine("varDecimal:\t{0:C2}", varDecimal);

			Console.WriteLine("\r\nFormatted with 5 digits:");
			Console.WriteLine("varInteger:\t{0:C5}", varInteger);
			Console.WriteLine("varFloat:\t{0:C5}", varFloat);
			Console.WriteLine("varDouble:\t{0:C5}", varDouble);
			Console.WriteLine("varDecimal:\t{0:C5}", varDecimal);
			Console.WriteLine();
			Console.Write("Press any key to continue... ");
			Console.ReadKey();
		}
	}
}

He responds with:

Sounds fine. I'm not sure that I totally understand why you cast a double into an int, instead of just storing the int. Yes, I see your explanation there, but I think that was part of the deal with having 4 different variables and was probably an extra line of text that wasn't necessary.

Oh, and keep in mind that often times with these textbooks, the author writes the text and someone else (maybe multiple someone elses) write the problems, summaries, student materials, etc, etc, etc. Not really that big of a deal, but its more than likely true. (See you never know what you might learn here)

So of course, why the heck are we learning from this 5 year old book in the first place — you know, the one my PROFESSOR told me was not really all that old and was a great book to learn C# from?

And of course that brings me to my final and most important point of my post — why can he not stop nitpicking? I mean, I explained that OCD frequently makes me do neurotic things and I've explained inline and in comments that I just wanted to, for no reason whatsoever. The only thing this moron can do is try and justify it in his own mind?

He cannot answer a simple question about C# coding conventions, but he can nitpick every moot point he sees fit?

I think my professor is an idiot.

You know what? Since I am rambling... let me tell you this final story. It relates to him saying that I should have had more programming classes before this one, but offers nothing in the way of actual assistance or guidance — and coding conventions just reminded me of it.

I asked if he had any C# design patterns or specifically a way to lay out my projects in a way that made sense and were easy to revisit after months or years of not perusing the code.

His response:

Are there any design patterns that I recommend? Yes, I'd recommend that you learn the different patterns and choose the most appropriate for the situation at hand. A good text to use when learning these is "Design Patterns" (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides) ISBN 0-201-63361-2.

I am so letdown at my college's offerings and staff at this point, I feel as if I have wasted an entire 2 years of my life and over $30,000 USD in tuition.

Did I mention I think my professor is an idiot?