Autodidact

I learn best by doing; every one of my top skills was acquired either on the job (Brown U., Carrier Transicold, Duke U.) or through independent work.

I had no prior experience with any of the following, at the time I first started using them, except where noted:

• Apache (for independent use)
• Borland Pascal (for Brown U.) - I took a course in Pascal at Duke in 1977, but it used punch cards and was not really applicable to Turbo/Borland Pascal
• C++ (for Duke U.)
• CSS (for independent use)
• FORTRAN IV/77 (for Brown U.) - I took one class in "Fortran for Engineering" at Duke circa 1983
• HTML (for independent use, later used for paid consulting work)
• Linux (as a desktop OS and for web projects) - learned some of the CLI from the owner of my ISP in Athens
• MS Access 97 (for Carrier) - first time using a relational database
• MySQL (for independent use) - applied what I had learned about SQL from MS Access and Microsoft SQL Server at Carrier
• Perl (for independent use) - my first language for interactive web pages
• PHP (for independent use) - originally tried a very early flavor (v1?) but found it inadequate. Returned to it when OOP was introuced (v4?)
• Transact-SQL (for Carrier) - this is the flavor of SQL used by MS SQL Server
• Visual Basic 6 (for Carrier)

see also: education