I’m going to take a short break from studying for tomorrow’s midterm to rant about it.
The class? Internet Application Development. Sounds interesting, right? (It did to me). What is the class actually about? PHP and MySQL.
My instructor is knowledgeable, and yes, I’m sure I will learn things (I don’t want to be that guy, the guy who thinks he already knows it all). But still; when I signed up for “Internet Application Development” I didn’t think that all I’d be doing was PHP and MySQL, the sort of things I taught myself on the web 2 or 3 years ago.
I had hoped I might learn things like:
- Creating web applications that scale. Running your app and/or database on multiple servers if load gets too high; maybe even an overview/discussion of grid computing?
- The MVC pattern, its pros and/or cons. It would seem to be a good choice since nearly every web app framework I’ve ever seen uses this pattern.
- Possibly even a comparison of the different languages/frameworks which could be used for web applications. I would expect that only Java and PHP would be talked about, but even an attempt to weigh pros and cons would be interesting.
But no. Instead I get to “learn” how good PHP’s require() function is. Really? Well thank you very much.
The only thing that keeps me from abandoning a degree altogether is that I’ve invested so much time in it, I just want to finish.
Okay, rant over. Back to studying for said midterm.
And over here on the liberal arts side, scaling, MVC, and comparative analysis of specific languages are all too *concrete* to bother discussing in class. What a country!
Where are we supposed to learn these sort of things? Are we just supposed to pick them up? I mean, we all do, but surely there’s value in organized curricula on these ideas.
Who wants to start a school with me? :)
Traditional academic institutions have always struggled to keep up with the fast-paced world of IT. This has been exacerbated by the even faster-paced world of the internet.