We had alphanumeric pagers and in the office was a terminal where one could type all sorts of stuff. Instead, the boss always typed "call shop". Nothing else. I was not willing to pay for a cellphone for myself, so if I got the page during the commute, I just continued on to the office. Where I'd be harangued for failing to find a pay phone (what‽). He always got angrier when I'd type in what he would have said if I had called in. He also got furious when I identified how one customer stole over $30k/year in inventory. That was the most dysfunctional job I ever worked at.
This was almost 30 years ago. I had gotten run over by a car and while I was healing, I started dabbling in programming around the office to organize some things that were out of control. Like the filing system was a write-only, read-never system. It would have been cheaper to just shred everything.
And to answer the OP...
Since it was all Windows stuff, I had to go to book stores and look for Wrox (red covers). Back then, they were decent, but that publisher turned into "shovelware" (a dozen photos on the cover and every chapter written by someone else, with hardly any coherence in the book). Apress ended up replacing them. And now stuff changes so fast, that books are obsolete before they can get through the publishing process.
"Source control" usually consisted of making zip archives on floppies. If the place had Source Safe, they better have good backups because SS had a problem corrupting files.
At my first "real" job programming, one clown who was responsible for a multi-million dollar product did not like to back up files. Nor use a UPS. So when his hard drive crashed, it turned out that his SourceSafe files were corrupted and we lost about a year's worth of development out of him. That got covered up.
We had alphanumeric pagers and in the office was a terminal where one could type all sorts of stuff. Instead, the boss always typed "call shop". Nothing else. I was not willing to pay for a cellphone for myself, so if I got the page during the commute, I just continued on to the office. Where I'd be harangued for failing to find a pay phone (what‽). He always got angrier when I'd type in what he would have said if I had called in. He also got furious when I identified how one customer stole over $30k/year in inventory. That was the most dysfunctional job I ever worked at.
This was almost 30 years ago. I had gotten run over by a car and while I was healing, I started dabbling in programming around the office to organize some things that were out of control. Like the filing system was a write-only, read-never system. It would have been cheaper to just shred everything.
And to answer the OP...
Since it was all Windows stuff, I had to go to book stores and look for Wrox (red covers). Back then, they were decent, but that publisher turned into "shovelware" (a dozen photos on the cover and every chapter written by someone else, with hardly any coherence in the book). Apress ended up replacing them. And now stuff changes so fast, that books are obsolete before they can get through the publishing process.
"Source control" usually consisted of making zip archives on floppies. If the place had Source Safe, they better have good backups because SS had a problem corrupting files.
At my first "real" job programming, one clown who was responsible for a multi-million dollar product did not like to back up files. Nor use a UPS. So when his hard drive crashed, it turned out that his SourceSafe files were corrupted and we lost about a year's worth of development out of him. That got covered up.