As a DBA grows older

I am a graduate from college in 2000. While I just graduated, I have had a total of 5 years experience in IT working for very large to very small companies.

I find myself in a situation as a DBA that while I can code, I am far from where I feel I should be. I mean this because I seem to find something in my last 2 jobs that I support that pulls time away from me being able to truly spend time figuring out the basics in code that I am far behind. While I can quickly learn ASP, I tend to be programming but not really understanding the basics, I tend to intuitively code using previous code and yet I understand completely what I am doing.

Basically, my responsibilities get greater, the jobs get more complex from company to company and I find myself swimming but trying to keep up with the current because at my latest job, they have crammed 2 programming jobs into one. CRM and a bunch of other stuff. CRM takes a lot of my time which I do code visually, I could be spending more time on ASP.Net, C#, VB, or stuff that I as a young programmer should be working till 3am in the morning doing.

So I find myself in a scattered situation, learning tidbits as quick as possible but not enough time to really think about what I am learning, Ijust apply it on the fly. I suppose this is the senario at most DBA environments but the company I work for is a small one rather than big so my time is just not there to really develop.

Have you experienced this or is this just how it is out there. I feel like I am creating ASP pages, VB pages, JavaScript and while I understand, I feel that I am jumping ahead and have missed studying the very basics in syntax and find myself having to go back to learn a basic rule after I have already coded it.

hard to explain but what do you say to thisEasy situation to get into.
It's bad to get into a situation where you are implementing thyings you don't understand but sometimes unnavoidable.

Get a good laptop, spend some time on long train journeys and visit web sites to learn and ask people who've done it before.
It's amazing what you can get through in a weekend.

There are a lot of systems being written now by people who don't really understand what they're doing (and don't seem to want to) and it shows in the architecture.|||As it is with any programming language it takes time to get a good feel for it and totally understand all the concepts. I have been working with ASP/Sql Server professionally for the last 3 years and I'm still learning new things all the time, but now there are so many new things to learn that I get the same feeling you have all over again. With XML, ASP.NET, C#, web services and all this other new stuff I also get the feel that I'm just barely keeping my head above the water. But I guess that's what it's like in this business... once you start to get the grip of something there is always something else that is newer and better.

I usually comfort myself with all those poor guys working with COBOL and Fortran and all that old stuff. At least I get somewhat close the the new technology...I think thats alot better than to be stuck with the same old crap year in and year out.|||In this current cyberworld LEARNING is never ENDING process and I second whatever Frett proposed it helps when you share your knowledge with other and explore new technologies.|||I can certainly relate. It's a strugle just keeping up with new database and database access technologies. But, in order to make myself more useful to our programmers, I've been trying to learn ASP, Java, VB, etc., and it's nearly impossible to keep up. I seem to get mired in the syntax and lose the architectural perspective I need.

BTW, can anyone recommend a good book that focuses on the architectural aspects of building web applications (ASP and/or J2EE)rather than the syntax and general programming techniques?|||Have you tried UNLEASED series for building web applications.|||No, I have not. I see that ASP.NET Unleashed is pretty highly rated on Amazon, have you read it?|||Yes UNLEASHED is my first preference always to read, since 1995.|||I agree those are high rated, but still its worth each penny you spend.