Java Seminar training - 50% Feb 5, 2005

Sun Jan 16 03:50:40 PST 2005

Another discount for BayLISA, 50% off the $199 Java Seminar training
coming up on Saturday, February 5, 2005 at the Hurricane Electric Fremont,
California facility. (so $99.50 for the 6 hour class!)

I attended the November Perl training with Randal Schwartz, and I wanted
to give you an idea of my experience.  ( I am already signed
up for the Java seminar because of the excellent experience I had in
November.  I'm hoping that BayLISA can work with HE to host some
more hardcore SA type training as well. )

First, normally the Perl course that was offered is done over 3 days.  It
was packed into 6 hours.  Breakfast was catered, as was lunch.  Training
book was provided with lots of space to take notes.  Also, at the end
of the training, Randal's book "Learning Perl Objects, References, and
Modules" was given out.

Randal really knows his topic, and answered all questions drilling down to 
the root of the question and handling wayward questions quite capabley 
(you know the type of question that leads the talk off into the wilderness 
leaving some lost, others bored..).  The course was Unix centric, but is 
applicable pretty much anywhere you can find perl.  I was interested to 
see that he uses emacs, and is a LISP expert as well.  One of the fun 
aspects was that he used Gilligan's Island in his examples to be a little 
different, and yet applicable through the different concepts he was 
teaching. It wasn't just about being cute with the training materials.

I've heard arguments for and against perl being object oriented, and 
Randal basically cut straight to the point and showed how perl is object 
oriented rather than focusing on all the terminology.  It was different 
than I've seen OO taught before, and from the looks on people's faces, 
quite helpful.  He linerialized the knowledge taking students from point 
to point, building solid foundations of understanding, then introducing 
the concepts.

Why would a sysadmin take this intermediate perl class?  It's a 
fundamental class for sysadmins wanting to create a library of reuseable 
code to solve problems, and to share back with the community.  For me it 
also gave me a good reflection of how much I knew (the first few hours was 
a fast paced review with kernels of wisdom as I learned a better way to do 
some things), and introduced me to writing my own modules.  For 
individuals who haven't had a lot of perl experience, I'd advise the 
Beginner class first.  Randal does speak fast and if you don't have a 
solid understanding of perl basics, you shouldn't jump in to the 
Intermediate class.

So why would a sysadmin take a Java class?  Well, I believe strongly in 
the idea that you have to be at least acquainted to the many languages out 
there. Depending on your role in your environment, you may find yourself 
supporting an application that is based on Java, or debugging system 
resource issues caused by java applications.  There is also no need to 
limit yourself from expanding your repertoire to include the capability to 
understand the development process better.  If you are having problems 
finding a job maintaining systems/network/security, getting some skills in 
development might not be so bad.  Or maybe you have always wanted to 
create that swiss army knife type tool that you've not found anywhere.

I look forward to seeing any of you who can make it to the training!  The 
following is the information I received from Tiffany from HE.

"Better Software, Faster: Java Seminar"

On Saturday, February 5, 2005, Hurricane Electric is hosting "Better 
Software, Faster," an informative Java seminar. Mike Clark, consultant, 
speaker, programmer and author of Pragmatic Project Automation (The 
Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2004) will lead the comprehensive seminar, designed 
for all Java software developers who have a working knowledge of Java and 
basic OO concepts. The seminar will focus on three key topics pertinent to 
Java software developers: writing good code, test-driven development, and 
project automation. Writing good code will focus on writing clean code, 
test-driven development will explore 12 practical ways to start writing 
JUnit tests, and project automation will give participants the recipes for 
automating software projects.

Attendees will receive a free copy of Mike Clark's new book, "Pragmatic
Project Automation."

BayLISA members will receive a 50% discount on the $199 seminar fee.

For more information and to register for this event, check out 
http://www.he.net/seminar/java.html, call 510-580-4141 or email Tiffany 
Morales at tmorales at he.net.  When registering online, place BayLISA in the 
Company field of the registration form.  If you are calling, or emailing 
Tiffany, make sure to mention BayLISA to receive the discount.

--
Jennifer Davis
BayLISA