I went back to school in a much more applied program (post-bacc at the Vehicle Research Institute at Western Washington University) than my undergrad (Engineering at Harvey Mudd). One of the classes we had to take was a basic CNC programming class. We started with hand-writing a program to carve our initials into a block of aluminum, all the way up to designing a much more complex part in a CAM system.<p>Of course I haven't touched a CNC machine since. Depending on your project you may or may not be hand-writing G&#38;M codes, but my understanding is that most professional work on anything but simple parts is done with a CAD/CAM package.