Training course plans for 2006
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2005-07-23 13:01:28 - Graham EllisYes, you did read that right. Even though it's still the middle of the summer, we've already got training courses booked right through to December and we're planning for 2006. There's a listing of courses for the rest of 2005 and January to December 2006 in our course description area, and a calendar showing the dates (and our availability for private courses) for 2006 in our Wiki.
So what has changed in 2005 and what will be new in 2006? I took this picture during last week's private Python course and it struck me that the trainee is reading from notes printed just a couple of days before the course ran, using on of our laptops that's just a couple of months old, and has been supplied with one of our new "goodie bags" (I'm not keen on that name, but customers keep using it!) containing pen, notepad, mousemat (2005 edition) and the current issue of "Of Course". I also note that he has his own laptop with him too; and that's becoming much more common - indeed, on courses at our training centre we always have one training system available per trainee but we're also happy to let trainees use their own laptop and connect it to our network.Public Courses
Perl Courses for 2006: We'll be running our regular Perl Programming course regularly throughout the year, and we anticipate that the course will start drifting from Perl 5 towards Perl 6 as dictated by the release of Perl 6 and market uptake. Our advanced courses - Perl for Larger Projects and Perl for the Web are currently scheduled only at the start of 2006; with forthcoming plans for Perl 6, it's simply too early to know exactly what our customer will be looking for 12 months from now.
Python training courses have been a big success in 2005, and will be running more frequently in 2006. Our three day Python Programming course will run as a public course every alternate month at our Melksham training centre and we have additional material that we can use as required to cover more specialist Python topics such as the Qt, Tk or wX GUIs, Jython, Python threading, etc.
We anticipate that teaching PHP classes will continue to be a major part of our work in 2006, and we've scheduled a public PHP course every two months. Alternate 4 days courses will be preceeded by an extra day covering the technology background needed by PHP programmers, and alternate courses will be followed by an extra day covering Object Oriented PHP - typically used on larger projects.
The C and C++ courses that we introduced recently are also scheduled throughout 2006 - there's a C introduction course, and two courses that cover C++ - one course on C++ for trainees without prior C experience and the other course of C++ for people who already know C.
The final programming courses we will be offering are on Tcl, Tcl/Tk and Expect. We've seen a significant increase in interest in [incr-Tcl] - the Object Oriented extension to Tcl and our Tcl programming course has recently been updated to increase the coverage of the OO aspects of the language. It's still a three day course that's usually followed by a two day course on the Tk GUI for user who'll be building graphics. Expect continues to be covered on the basic course.
The other area that we're very active is in the Deployment of Open Source Applications and the provision of training on that deployment. Our Deploying Apache/Tomcat course has been full on several occasions already this year, and will run every alternate month throughout 2006. Our Linux introductions - Linux Basics, Linux Administration and Linux Web Server will run every few months (and will preceed the Tomcat course for anyone who needs both courses). And finally (but far from least) our two day MySQL course will continue to introduce newcomers to SQL and MySQL to the principles of the database, installation and maintainance of MySQL, and how to interface programs in a variety of languages such as Perl, PYP, Python, Java and C to MySQL.
Private Courses
The public courses described above will occupy about a half of our resources ... with the rest used to provide tailored private courses. Private courses can be run at our training centre, or at your offices, and remain the best value if you have four or more trainees requiring the same course at the same time. Very easy to book a private course ... and we provide all the notes, equipment needed and the tutor.
For 2006, we've scheduled public courses for the first two weeks of each month and then left the last two weeks of the month for private courses. We're also altering our travel arrangements for such courses. You will find that you're being charged an extra night's hotel expenses next year for many locations - the roads are getting busier, and with current security scares it's getting less easy to arrive reliably and fresh at your office on the first morning of the course. We have always travelled in our own time anyway, so you won't get any extra travel charges and you will get a much fresher tutor.
Private courses are offered in all the subjects listed above under the public course heading, and we may also be able to help with other features of Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl/Tk, Expect and Linux that are not on the public courses, and also with Ruby training. We're no longer offering private programming training in Java - there simply aren't enough hours in the day for us to offer this and keep up to date on the subject.
And Also ...
Within the last year, we've visited Italy, Greece and Turkey to learn more about Linux, Perl, PHP and MySQL from the original authors and the movers and shakers of those technologies. In the previous year, we took in similar coverage of Python. It's to early to be precise, but I'm expecting that 2006 will see us heading off to one or two distant venues - perhaps to get ourselves up to speed on Perl 6, or perhaps for some other new and up coming technolgy. We remain committed to presenting you with excellent, up to date open source courses thoughout 2006, presented from a position of technical strength by members of our team.