Industry

1) Hm. Electrical Engineering? I have an electrical engineering degree myself, and the only programming I was required to study was a semester of.. urk... FORTRAN. Well, maybe programming a microcontroller kind of counts, but that's a little board you plug in via serial cable when programming it, and when it's functioning it usually isn't anywhere near a computer. I took a bunch of classes on the side for most of my programming schooling. I would say that you learn a lot more about what goes on inside of your computer in electrical engineering than in CS, and maybe get a more solid grounding in things like state machines and digital logic, but I would think that most programmers have CS degrees these days. I've always thought myself lucky to get an SE job with an EE degree.

2) Microsoft has some stuff on their site, obviously. Codeguru is great for MFC and Win32 programming, but not DirectX. To be honest I haven't found any really great DirectX sites other than this one. Try typing "DirectX Programming" into your fave search engine.

-fel

Edited by - felisandria on October 18, 2000 5:52:38 PM

1) your friend is obviously mistaken... an electrical engineering degree will not get you far when looking for a programming job (though it won''t be impossible to get a programming job with that degree, as felisandria has shown, it is tons easier if you get a CSC (Computer Science) degree). The only reason I can think of for your friend to recommend an electrical engineering degree is if the college/university in question does not explicitly offer a CSC degree. (BTW -- the correct word would be who, don''t overuse the word whom... whom is used as the object of a preposition (to whom, of whom, etc))

2) try flipcode... not necessarily devoted to DirectX, it does have a lot of great game programming info (and then some), including information on DirectX (and OpenGL).

"Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be."
        --William Hazlitt

When i said he recomended electrical engineering, he meant ON TOP OF a degree in computer science...guess is hould have put that part in... He said your more likely to get a job in programming if u got that?

What happened to "flipcode"? It doesn''t seem to work.
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I got into the industry with a degree in computer science and mathematics, but if I could do it again I''d choose physics instead of mathematics. The last two years of a math degree are 95% theory...

<-- also a EE who has been magically transformed into a SE.

A solid grasp of programming will make you a GREAT engineer if you go into any of the digital fields, communications, signal processing (which I''m in), etc. 60-80% of what you do in these fields is programming, from perl to C++.

However, I don''t think it works the other way around, especially for game programming. On a very high level, both degrees teach you to solve abstract problems. But knowing Maxwell''s equations isn''t going to help you with game programming, other than giving you a painful experience in 3d vector equations.

Don''t Electrical Engineers make the video game systems and the Programmers make the video games?

Computer systems engineers (what i am) both make the machines and program them. It covers all that CS does, but you can call yourself an engineer :p

actually, that degree takes a lot of EE stuff and adds CS stuff. (replace power electronics with programming)

Wyzfen