home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: mail2news.demon.co.uk!MERCURY
- From: Micah K Yoder <YODERMK@cc.emu.edu>
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Getting real world marketable experience in C++
- Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 01:17:38 EDT
- Organization: Eastern Mennonite University
- Message-ID: <26404B9307B@cc.emu.edu>
- X-NNTP-Posting-Host: MERCURY
- X-Confirm-Reading-To: "Micah K Yoder" <YODERMK@cc.emu.edu>
- X-Pmrqc: 1
- Priority: normal
- X-Mailer: Pegasus Mail v3.22
- content-length: 2385
- X-Mail2News-Path: inserv1.emu.EDU!cc.emu.edu!CC/MERCURY!MERCURY
-
- Hi!
-
- I'm a CS major at a small university and am wondering what it takes
- to get marketable experience in C++. Our CS department has some
- strong points (few students means more involvement on the campus
- network development), but I'm a little worried because we haven't had
- any real experience. I've heard of other college students having to
- write Pascal compilers, but our homework is generally little snippets
- to help us understand concepts. I'm a senior now and will be
- graduating in three months, and our school has only intoduced C++
- this semester! (We'd been using Pascal before then, but I started
- teaching myself C++ a couple years ago.)
-
- Anyway, I feel like I understand nearly all of the concepts of the
- language and most of the syntax, but I have yet to write anything
- significant. My biggest programming accomplishment was writing a
- program that can symbolically differentiate equations entered in as
- strings, and graphing them, in OOP Borland Pascal (although I never
- figured out how to get it to differentiate f(x)=u^v because there's
- not a simple rule for that, and the simplify routine has a couple
- quirks), and even that was on my own and not an assignment.
-
- I've been reading up on C++ - _C++ How to Program_ by Dietel & Dietel
- and _Black Belt C++: The Master's Collection_ by Eckel, both of which
- seem to be pretty good books conceptwise. But what should I do to
- get experience?
-
- One thing I've been dreaming of for a while is simulating the game of
- Monopoly, using an ADT for a computer player and deriving different
- players from it with different strategies of playing (I always have
- wanted to find out exactly how much of that game is luck...now if I
- can have simulated players with different strategies play 10,000
- games overnight maybe I can find out!). But would that be enough to
- prove I know C++ well?
-
- Is there something else I should read?
-
- Are there employers that will hire "entry level" programmers?
-
- Thanks for putting up with this message, and PLEASE copy your
- response to E-mail as my USENET access is limited and, despite my
- good intentions, I miss most postings to this group.
-
- Later!
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Micah K. Yoder + Vote for *character* and *principle*:
- WWW Support + ALAN KEYES for President!
- Eastern Mennonite University +
-