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Finding Educational Materials For A Linux Class?
Doug Carter asks: "I am a senior Linux developer/system/network guy at a rapidly growing startup. Part of my resonsibilities is to help educate new aspiring Linux folks and otherwise evanglize the use of Open Source within our company. I thought a great way to do this would be with informal brown bag sessions, once or twice a week. The only thing I'm missing is some generic Linux class education material that I can talk to. I could write it myself, but I hate reinventing the wheel and I'm sure there are some useful materials out there already. I've been searching the net for weeks now and the only stuff I've found is online tutorials (that can't be downloaded) and Linux materials that people are actually charging for! In the wonderful world of open source software, where are the open source education materials?"
Rute, the beginner's guide to Linux
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
Is an avid Linux fanatic and he has taught Linux in the past. You can look at his reference materials at: http://apollo.saultc.on.ca/~fcarella/courses.html They are, *of course* in Word format. :)
It's been my experience that "free" tutorial/introduction materials are in short supply. Find a commercial book and talk from that.
I taught a UNIX class, on and off, for about six months. The springboard was an introduction to UNIX book, but the exercises and handouts were developed (and copyrighted) by the continuing education company I freelanced for. Finding the book is easy. Comming up with a "good" set of training/tutorial exercises is "hard".
Think about how much time you want to put into this, too, and the kinds of sessions you want to have. I gave informal talks at a previous employer where I did "illuminated MAN pages", i.e. print the MAN page for the topic de jure (including the MAN command ;) ) and talk about all the crufty little arguments you can throw at any particualar UNIX command.
hope this helps
stirring the pot since nineteen mumblty mumble
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
Although the license is reasonably free, (and it comes in printer-friendly formats like pdf and postscript) it might not be free enough for you:
'This work may not be reproduced in hard copy except for personal use. Further, it may not be reproduced in hard copy for training material, nor for commercial gain, nor for public or organisation-wide distribution. Further, it may not be reproduced in hard copy except where the intended reader of the hard copy initiates the process of converting the work to hard copy.'
So it looks like it would be illegal to print it for them, and although I can't see anything wrong with telling them the location of it and letting it print it out, it would be illegal to use it as course material. [This is probably because the book is being published]
The LDP HOWTOs are much freer - hence the profusion of $20 books collating them all (generally badly labeled, so most people wouldn't realise that they are HOWTOs unless they'd seen the HOWTOs before).
Rute does leave some things to be desired, so why not write/start a 'Linux manual'?
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
Linux.com has weekly newbie articles. Also Linux Journal occassionaly has some worthy newbie articles. Of course, nothing beats handing out RedHat cds and making 'em install linux at home.
Someone you trust is one of us.
If our currently released modules don't cover topics which interest you, let us know. There are several unreleased modules in the pipeline.
Dave Fisher
GBdirect / Linux Training Materials Project
Think of the sheer volume of time that must be spent creating the material for a course, then the additional volume of time that must be spent editing and verifying this material, and then the additional chunk that must be spent making sure that this is all taught in a consistent and flowing manner.
/well/ are usually found in seperate groups (programmers, editors, teachers); that each group's time is very valuable (in terms of average pay); and that individuals who fall far into multiple of these groups have an even /higher/ value placed upon their time.
Now, consider that individuals who have the skills to accomplish the first, second, and third tasks
People do the hard tech stuff, because it is fun. People write docs because they have to. People edit docs because they are paid to. Noone reorders docs for 'fun', 'cause it sucks, and they could be playing with code.
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
www.linuxslides.com is a fairly large repository of materials from various Linux-related presentations and talks (including introductory ones) which you may find useful.
Just grab every man page you can find, print it, and tell them to learn it all over the weekend. ;-)
Simple 'nuff
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
We have a great Linux/Apache course that we run in our training programs. It is geared to the new user, without an 'RTFM' attitude, and it has many useful exercises and links to related materials. We spent two months developing the course, and have had customers for it since the day it was completed.
Would we give it away for free? No chance. Like it or not, we are in the training _business_. Our course materials are our product, and giving them away would mean shutting down our operations.
The idea that everything should be free as in beer, AKAIK, is not the intention of open source (or free software, whatever). Course materials take time and resources to produce, and they bring value to the market. Those who bring value to the market should be rewarded with more than just an ego trip. Let's not get into the mindset that if it's not free as in beer, it's against the spirit of Linux. Open source software needs credible business models to survive. Training materials and books are a large part of that business model. Let's encourage them, and support open source.
Anyway, if you search anywhere for "foo tutorial" you'll find a wealth of information for free.
slairetam esruoc eht ni detseretni era uoy fi di.oc.etutitsni@sugna si liame my
I am President of my University's Linux User Group. A good place to look is on various Linux User's Group's websites. I know my group gives a weekly talk on various topics related to Linux, Unix, etc. and we try to post the slides, etc. of all of our talks on our website. Check out http://cwrulug.cwru.edu/talks/
I also know of one or two other Linux Users Groups that do a similar thing. This is a wealth of information.
The Netizen training docs are under the Open Publications License, so they're both libre and free.
I don't know what distro you are using but if you are willing to use Debian you might try this Yes with Debian the install is a little harder and you have to configure many things by hand but IMHO this is better for learning and since 2.2 no longer makes you deal with dselect I think it makes a reasonable choice for a class.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
The homepage is http://ils.unc.edu/inls183.
Strictly speaking, the materials are copyrighted by me and UNC. But help yourself to anything useful, and feel free to ask if you want to make more extensive use.
Depending on what you're aiming at, my favourite site in the whole wide world - www.linuxnewbie.org, has a good selection of NHF's, desiged for the newbie (hence newbiedised help files). If you're looking at HOWTOS, you may as well check these out.
Perl and Linux have a pretty good synergy... Perl makes a fantastic little scripting language for Linux use. It gives you some fantastic opportunities to show off the real muscle of *nix based systems (like "find", "dd", "cut", "tar", and many others). Further, you could probably even get a "never ever" to be writing simple programs in only an hour or so of teaching. Having taught Perl on both Linux and Windows, I can think of no better way to demonstrate the strengths of Linux.
If you get into some depth, you could then teach some simple Perl based CGI. You have to struggle through references, objects, and regular expressions to do it right, but students will totally "light up" when they see a dynamic page they wrote come to life on a web server, and Linux is a great platform for a Perl CGI dynamic setup.
Feel free to use notes that I prepared for a similiar class for both Perl, and Perl CGI. There are a few typos in them that I need to clean up over the holiday break, but they are 99% fine.
The Perl notes links are about ten lines down the page. They are GPL'd. I made a point of following the "Learning Perl" (O'Rielly book) order of topic presentation, so that students that want a deeper resource can follow a parallel presentation of topics.
Bill
Mathematically impossible requirements are technically not against policy.
Yeah, well man pages aren't really what most people need these days. May be for the likes of you and me it is fine. I mean, I understand most of the technical crap they put in man pages because I have been working on UNIX for 10 years. Also, I have a sturdy background training in computing so I can understand the issues easily. Heck, I don't even need the man pages, just read the source Luke!
But, if we want average Joe Bloggs to start using Linux rather than windoze we have to begin understanding that not everyone comes from a technical background. Shouting at them "RTFM!" isn't going to help them much. What is needed is freely available, easy to understand documentation that explains the concepts and ideas involved in running Linux successfully.
I am giving some lectures in some Arab countries to people in the Medical profession. The possiblities for them using Linux are hugh. They are so restricted by their present closed source unstable solutions. They are very interested in using Linux. How are they meant to start understanding it?
We all like to complain how crap windoze is. Personally the only time I use windoze is when I go to my Mum's house because that is all she has. But she is not likely to run Linux unless we make decent documentation available. Enough of "RTFM" lets write some decent documenatition so that Linux can truely be used beyond the current limited cliche of geeks.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
Here is a site that might solve part of your problem:
linuxcommand.org
--
Howard Roark, Architect
Howard Roark, Architect
I believe in a Man's right to exist for his own sake.
Most Linux course try to include this demonstration:
Take out a raw egg and say, "This is your brain." Then say,"This is your brain on Windows." Then pelt Bill Gates with the egg.
The reason this is usually skipped is that it's tough to get Bill Gates, but it's worth the extra effort.
It's all here, and it's all under open licenses of one sort or another.
But I've got to say, I was somewhat perturbed by the fraction of Linux training material which was proprietary...
Fixing copyright
Actually, a lot of GPL software has _great_ documentation. The GCC manual has about 600 pages of great material, covering a lot of the compiler's internals. The GNOME project likewise has wonderful documentation, including Havoc's book. I don't see where you get the idea the GPL discourages documentation
Engineering and the Ultimate
You could try 85321
I once exchanged mails with one of the authors of this fine material. He said that I could print out as many copies that I wanted to, and he'd even send me the CD-Roms if I would in exchange send him a photo of pupils using the material! (Un)fortunately I got another job before I got to use the book, but it's a very cool book
Check out my PHP Url Validator
I've put up slides from several talks I have done on my web page. Several of the talks are fairly similar to each other, explaining some of the benefits of Open Source to several different audiences. There might be useful material there. FWIW...
-- "Ever wonder why the SAME PEOPLE make up ALL the conspiracy theories?"
After you've had a couple sessions to go through the basics, you could consider using one of the HOWTO's at linuxdoc.org for a topic for each brown bag session.
A lot of people would probably be interested in some of the common time-suckers when you're getting started with a new linux box such as how to get your dial-up connection set up. Mix the HOWTO material with your own experience and tips so that people are getting more than what they just could have read themselves.
A really big favor you could do to your coworkers is start to teach them about security and linux. Nothing sucks more for a newbie than finally getting their first linux box up and running on their cable modem, only to have it cracked within the hour. Totally demoralizing.
I imagine you'll do a session on how to install a new machine -- this is a great time to go into why and how to shut down unnecessary services, install ssh, install patches, etc. etc.
Just include it as part of the standard installation process. That's the sort of stuff that will make your seminars really unique and valuable -- securing your new box is really important, but isn't covered very often in off-the-shelf documentation.
-- Scott
I was thinking the same thing. Instead of teachng the students about "Linux" why not jump right to the chase and start teaching your new students from the GNU Emacs Manual. It's packed full of exciting information, it's free, and it's very well written. Once your students have learned Emacs they won't need to use any other programs.
The Greater Lansing Linux User Group resources webpage has pointers to a few tutorials that we've cooked up for use at meetings.
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