A solid working knowledge of productivity software and other IT tools has become a basic foundation for success in virtually any career. Beyond that, however, I don't think you can overemphasise the importance of having a good background in maths and science.....

"Every software system needs to have a simple yet powerful organizational philosophy (think of it as the software equivalent of a sound bite that describes the system's architecture)... A step in thr development process is to articulate this architectural framework, so that we might have a stable foundation upon which to evolve the system's function points. "

"All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change"

"The ultimate measurement is effectiveness, not efficiency "

"It is argued that software architecture is an effective tool to cut development cost and time and to increase the quality of a system. "Architecture-centric methods and agile approaches." Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming.

"Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs "

"When done well, software is invisible"

"Our words are built on the objects of our experience. They have acquired their effectiveness by adapting themselves to the occurrences of our everyday world."

"I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn't know it would be called Ruby. "

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

"In 30 years Lisp will likely be ahead of C++/Java (but behind something else)"

"Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)"

"Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible. "

"Software engineering is the establishment and use of sound engineering principles in order to obtain economically software that is reliable and works efficiently on real machines."

"Model Driven Architecture is a style of enterprise application development and integration, based on using automated tools to build system independent models and transform them into efficient implementations. "

"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. "

"Software Engineering Economics is an invaluable guide to determining software costs, applying the fundamental concepts of microeconomics to software engineering, and utilizing economic analysis in software engineering decision making. "

"Ultimately, discovery and invention are both problems of classification, and classification is fundamentally a problem of finding sameness. When we classify, we seek to group things that have a common structure or exhibit a common behavior. "

"Perhaps the greatest strength of an object-oriented approach to development is that it offers a mechanism that captures a model of the real world. "

"The entire history of software engineering is that of the rise in levels of abstraction. "

"The amateur software engineer is always in search of magic, some sensational method or tool whose application promises to render software development trivial. It is the mark of the professional software engineer to know that no such panacea exist "