I decided to make this post because I’m working on a decent list of the Top Ten Computer Schools in the Philippines, to accompany my recent Top Ten Articles, Top Ten Art Schools in the Philippines and Top Ten Business Schools in the Philippines.
There re a LOT of computer-oriented schools in the Philippines and it’s important to know that you are not buying into a “pig in the poke” when you choose one.
Many selection factors are easy and similar to schools in other disciplines but a major difference in the computer sphere of influence is, technology and course offerings go stale, quickly. Here, in no particular order, or ten technologies/skills I have learned, used or contracted big dollars for in the past which are virtually useless today:
1. Cobol This is one of the most venerable of existing languages and the one on the list most likely to still be useful to learn. Cobol still powers a significant number of “big business” systems and ads for Cobol programmers and administrators are still to be found. It’s one of the few “antiques that I have found US-based post-secondary training still available for, at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, (greater St Louis area) is one source that verifies the argument that studying Cobol may not be a totally lost cause.which according to Mary Sumner, a professor there, still offers a Cobol course. “Two of the major employers in the area still use Cobol, and for many of their entry-level jobs, they want to see that on the transcript,” she says. “Until that changes, we’d be doing the students a disservice by not offering it.” (see also: “Cobol Coders: Going, Going, Gone? )
2. Nonrelational DBMS In the 1980s, there were two major database management systems approaches: hierarchical systems, such as IBM’s IMS and SAS Institute Inc.’s System 2000, and network DBMS, such as CA’s IDMS and Oracle Corp.’s DBMS. Today, you had better be learning using the DBMS approach, such as SQL databases such as DB2, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.
3. Non-IP networks TCP/IP has largely taken over the networking world, and as a result, there’s less demand than ever for IBM Systems Network Architecture (SNA) skills. The few Non-IP technologies even less popular than SNA are definitely ones to avoid. Even if you were to get a job on one of these dinosaur networks you’d, be a virtually “pariah” to your employer, always figuring out ways to eliminate the non-standard systems and perhaps you along with it
4. cc:Mail This store-and-forward LAN-based e-mail system from the 1980s was once used by about 20 million people. Its popularity waned, and in 2000, it was withdrawn from the market. The product is still supported however by According to Foote, “cc:Mail is a bygone era. Now e-mail is tied into everything else, and cc:Mail didn’t make that leap.” Just the same, the product continues to be commercially supported by Global System Services Corp. in Mountain View, California, so it is still not totally dead.
5. ColdFusion This once-popular Web programming language — released in the mid-1990s by Allaire Corp. (which was later purchased by Macromedia Inc., which itself was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.) — has since been superseded by other development platforms, including Microsoft Corp.’s Active Server Pages and .Net, as well as Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other open-source languages. There is still an active ColdFusion community but to my view, anone learning technology would be well advised to stick with one of the more mainstream environments.
Part 2 will publish tomorrow, this is long enough for one post.
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