Why do colleges force feed M$?

Is it just my college, or do others in school find that there are few or NO courses in programming that arent windows based? Every project assigned, every book read, everything that i have ever learned in school has been WINDOWS. This seems strange to me, because from what i have read, Microsoft only dominates the consumer market. Many businesses/companies run Linux/Sun/etc, yes? Is my school getting paid off by M$ or something? Do others in college have this same problem, or does my school just suck it?

Funny...
When I was in college (graduated in '99) I was looking for stuff to help me learn the MFC/Win32 apis for C++ but none existed.

At my college there was a special program between it, Caltech, and the Pasadena Art Center where students could elect to take a certain number of classes at the others that they were not specifically enrolled to and when I went to Caltech looking for stuff for M$ everything was Unix based. I remember complaining all through college about learning all theory and no practical experience.



-b

When I started college back in 95 they had just installed NT... which looked identical to the windows 3.1 back then. Most work was done on the vax system. Over the next few years we started to do more work on the Sun systems and Windows system.

The whole dot com thing happened so I dropped out and just recently went back in May of 2002 and graduated May of 2003. Obviously being the last year of school most of my classes were upper level classes like Formal Languages and Automata and Data Analysis. The professors did not care what language you wrote your programs in or what operating system you used it was all about the ideas.

In short my college did not care if you used unix or ms and I would hate to go to one that had a preference for one over the other. Although the fact that John S. Gray URL was a professor at the school probably helped. Always nice taking classes with people that write books on Unix Internals and Linux Internals it certainly teaches you a lot.

at the uni i go to,
we strictly uses linux, and before that we used sun solaris,

java is the basic programming language here,
but more important than learining java is it to learn how to program in general
regardless of the language, java just happend to be the language we use.

I can't imagine any school that restricts to one platform. My university has about 40,000 students, and you bet there is a lot of diversity. In general, the Computer Science department hates Windows and uses exclusively Unix. Computer Engineering is pretty much the same. However, the Computer Technology program, which I am in, is the opposite. There is no course that really uses Unix on a large scale. So of course, people like me who wish to extend their knowledge outside of Windows have to do some extra reading outside class.

in Computer Technology, there is a course called "Programming for the Internet." Only ASP (currently upgrading to ASP.NET) is taught. Again, more Windows/M$.

The funny thing is that even though Computer Science embraces Sun, there is no support from Sun at all. Microsoft, on the other hand, is all over the department. Conversely, Computer Technology embraces Microsoft, but there is no support from M$ whatsoever. I think Sun might actually be one of our corporate partners. LOL

Yes that is how it should be. You need to learn the logic and how to think and problem solve. The languages and operating systems are just tools to use to get the job done and programmers should select the right tool to get the job done right not just the tool they are most familar with.

Unfortunetly in business getting the job done is usually what is most important to the "suits" (have to bring in the money right) hence the reason windows products tend to have more issues than unix products.

I was involved in business information systems classes, and it was MS all the way. (graduated 2000) I remember DISTINCTLY asking my database professor a question about Mysql and PHP, and he turned to me and said "What is that?".

Im not lying. It seems that professors (at least at my school) were so concerned with current curriculum, that they didnt want, or didnt have time to learn the newest technology. Which seems backwards to me, but nonetheless, we were actually learning MS Access in my Database class.

I learned Access in my introductory App Development class. It's not a bad prog if you don't know about mysql, oracle, etc

Eventually I'll get to some classes about Oracle, but I'd have learned about it before then outside of class.

One interesting thing: The class I'm taking next semester teaches ASP, but I will have already learned ASP.NET this summer :lol: I'm sure I'll have fun in that course.

I don't like Access. Maybe because it's developed by MicroSnot, but also because I think it's because I think a developer is much more flexible if he uses a programming language and integrate it to a more acceptable database like MySQL.

Not really backwards if you think about it in a different way. At my senior lunch I talked to Prof. Anderson (he does a lot of AI stuff and has published some AI papers). He teaches a graphics class which was based on OpenGL and I asked if he was still teaching it using OpenGL or if he has converted to DirectX (I personally like OpenGL but all my friends that work in the gamming industry tend to lean towards DirectX).

His response was it took me long enough to learn OpenGL. You want me to spend all that time again to learn DirectX that is crazy. I agree with him considering it is the logic and problem solving that you are learning not the language.

I have heard many people complain "Why don't you teach me X language?". My response is why don't you read the manual or pick up a book an LEARN X language. When I started in college back in 95 we were using pascal on a vax system. Then all of a sudden the school switched over to C++ and we were just expected to learn it on our own and we did it was not that big a deal.

I think the purpose of going to college and taking classes is to teach you how to learn not to teach you a specific language or technology. If you want to learn a specific language or technology either pick up a book or go take a cert course.

"I think the purpose of going to college and taking classes is to teach you how to learn not to teach you a specific language or technology. If you want to learn a specific language or technology either pick up a book or go take a cert course."

yup, you got that right. I learned most of my IT skills outside college with a little from experience, friends and good all fashioned book reading.

let me rephrase that...

yup, you got that right. I learned most of my IT skills outside college with a little help from experience, friends and good old fashioned book reading.

- well i agree with that. i'm looking @ my desk right now, and in front of me i see: TCP/IP Ilustrated, Exploring Expect, Real World Linux Security, HTTP by Oreilly, Red Hat Linux 8, Perl - How To Program, Unix Network Programming... none of these are things being taught at my school. If anything, i would say i've learned more from myself and the kind folks here than from my teachers. I wasnt really complaining, rather just curious as to why what i learn in school doesnt reflect/encompass the jobs that are out there. i just feel like im wasting my $ sometimes at school. a few weeks b4 school ended i asked my teacher (also chair of CS department) about buffer overflows, and then i ended up explaining to him how they worked... which is another thing that bothers me, security is not even touched upon in any of the courses offered!!! how that is possible? i dont know? but it makes me wish i hadnt ****ed around in high school as much, maybe i would be @ MIT now instead

yes, I'm afraid your college or department just plain suck.