For All Web Designers: Academic learning vs self taught learning

Question

I'm quite curious about your experience learning html, css, php, js web standards etc. Did you consider learning them in college or institutes or you think it's absolutely unnecessary (learning from StackOverFlow is way better?)?

I'm asking this because I'm taking some Web design courses at my university and the teacher still uses frames for layout and FrontPage and another apps that were used in the age of windows 95. Web design standards and methods change every day so I'm really questioning if it's useful to learn from teacher who can't get used to new software for web design or new technologies (for instance CSS3 or HTML5). Maybe I'm wrong what's your opinion?

Answer 1

...and the teacher still uses frames for layout and FrontPage and another apps that were used in the age of windows 95.

I would pass that up. Seriously.

This kind of information is going to be totally useless to you.

Answer 2

I learn best by jumping in and getting my hands dirty. Some people like the more structured approach. My advice to you would be go to Barnes and Noble or Amazon and buy a few books.

As far as the teacher using FrontPage... Waste of time.

Answer 3

I'll throw my cheap 2 cents in.

What college taught me

College taught me theory, and math.

College taught me algorithms and how to analyze them.

What college didn't teach me

What college didn't teach me was good coding practices and following standards.

College didn't really teach me full blown applications connected to databases

The only way to learn is to work at it, either on your own or in a job

Answer 4

In general with our industries it's hard, if not impossible for colleges to really keep up with the changing pace of the standards.

When I look at the web design principles from 3 or 4 years ago, a lot has changed. CSS support has gotten a lot better, JavaScript runtimes are so much more robust, libraries and templates are out there to make thins so much easier on us.

Go back to when I learned HTML 4 (from a book and practice incidentally) the common place thing was html tables, CSS was new and had widely disparate implementations, and I spent more time trying to figure out how to get around browser bugs than I did most other things put together, and that was less than a decade ago.

Regardless of what you do with the classes, the single most important thing I can advise is keep learning what's going on now. Read blogs, try out things, and just keep making sites and trying to do something cool.

Answer 5

College classes are usually outdated. I graduated just a few years ago - I took two years of programming in High School. The second year, the language taught switched from C++ to Java. When I went to college the following year, the language taught was C++.

But college taught me a lot about OOP, data structures and algorithims.

I recently taught myself PHP and MySQL from an O'Reilly book. I then expand on that with stuff I find on the web.

But the old stuff isn't all that bad either. Maybe you'll end up mantaining a site that still uses that old stuff?