Not entirely CF related but I did a 12 week night courses earlier this year called Fundamentals of Java (http://www.shortcourses.uts.edu.au/code/coursedetails.php?&sc_code=ITR19).
I've got a bunch of complaints about the course (see below), but on the whole I think it was a very worthwhile experience. I'm not looking at becoming a full time Java programmer, but I think it was helpful for all round programming & CFMX in particular. The negatives were: - The format of the course material was pretty poor. Its standard CISCO based stuff & designed so its as hard as possible to reproduce or rip off. Fair enough in principle but this was taken to the extreme and negatively impacted on the learning experience. I'm the kind of person who likes to print stuff out so I can read over it on my deck with the morning cup of coffee - the materials were flash based & so you needed to be in front of a PC & online to get to them. I got over this by using Bruce Eckel's stuff & an O'Reilly book as additional material. - The CISCO material was not great. They tended to use their own language which differed significantly from what I was picking up in other places. Also there were errors & inconsistencies throughout the material. - The tools we were told to use (BlueJ) were sub standard in comparison to what is available (Eclipse). - The presenter rambled for the better part of 3 hours every night. Sorry I don't learn that way, I can't absorb straight three hours of theory. I need hands on time to explore the ideas we're talking about. More Q&A and practical time would have been much better. - Some materials were missing :( I am a picky bastard so take that with a grain of salt. Having said all that the facilities were great, I learnt heaps, I got two nice certificates (one from CISCO & one from UTS) and it was all pretty cheap as far as IT training goes. If you are looking for certificate style stuff I would definitely suggest this to anyone who's keen on improving their programming knowledge & their understanding of what's going on in CFMX. If you are disciplined enough & don't really care about a pieces of paper I think you could learn just as much in 12 weeks with a copy of Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) & Bruce Eckel's fantastic "Thinking in Java" book (http://64.78.49.204/) which are both completely free. Cheers Mark ______________ Mark Stanton Web Production Gruden Pty Ltd Tel: 9956 6388 Mob: 0410 458 201 Fax: 9956 8433 http://www.gruden.com --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MX Downunder AsiaPac DevCon - http://mxdu.com/
