Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-11-16 07:40:47 - Graham Ellis
It feels like Tuesday - so I almost put out the bins before I left home for the fortnightly rubbish collection. But it isn't Tuesday - it's only Monday morning, and only just 8 O'Clock
It was something of an experiment when we added an optional day onto the front of our programming courses, when we noticed a trend for a small proportion of our delegates to be completely new to programming, whereas in the past they have been much more "convertors" who learned to program at college - perhaps in a language such as pascal. And we added the day, sometimes, on a Sunday so that we didn't need to reschedule the regular course, advised by a couple of potential candidates that they would be very happy to attend on a Sunday and give up their weekend, since their employer was retraining them for a new future role and paying for the course, and they should give some of their time too ...
The experiment has been the most amazing success. And we had four out of five of our hotel rooms taken on Saturday night by delegates attending Learning to Program in Python starting yesterday. The remaining room was taken last night by a further delegate attending Python Programmin which starts in an hour, and there are three other delegates too for that course who are taking the non-residential option.
Have a look at our late 2009 and all of 2010 training schedule if you're looking to learn to program ("never done it before / don't know where to start" or "goodness - not done any programming for 20 years and that was in assembler on a PDP/11") in Java, Perl, C, C++, Tcl, Lua, PHP, Ruby ... or Python. In each case, we cover basis principles on that extra first day. But in each case, all of the examples I use will be in your target language - there's no longer the need to learn the principles in Basic or Pascal, then switch to a different target language for your job role.
Illustration - our "Wilts" training room, at 08:30 on Sunday morning - ready for delegates who were at breakfast at the time!
The experiment has been the most amazing success. And we had four out of five of our hotel rooms taken on Saturday night by delegates attending Learning to Program in Python starting yesterday. The remaining room was taken last night by a further delegate attending Python Programmin which starts in an hour, and there are three other delegates too for that course who are taking the non-residential option.