Seeking Hands-on Training Programs?

thekernel32 asks: "Recently the topic of getting people trained in the Linux/UNIX environment has troubled me. Where are people going for this stuff? I recall taking an Microsoft Networking Essentials class that I dropped out of. The reason why I dropped the Microsoft class was because we were being taught about the existence of Routers, File Servers and other networking topics, but we never saw or [worked with] any of them. I really feel that it would have been more useful to get hands on experience with daemons and real hardware, rather than just being told that they exist. What decent training programs out there have a hands on approach?"

Comments

Cisco Certification

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend of mine recently became Cisco certified. He had to configure a hardware router (among other things) for one of the exams. This could be the sort of thing you're after. Check it out.

Recomendation: Onsight, Internal Training Depts.

[aguasch]

I worked for Morotola for many years, and had quite a few training classes through them. I imagine many other big companies have internal classes that are very hands on. Ours were 10-20 people, each with their own machine, which worked out really well. Lots of coding/experimenting/lab time is a must.

Most of the instructors were using stock Motorola class stuff, some of which wasn't great, but if you have a good instructor that can make up for it.

The best instructor was James Lee from Onsight.com who had a bunch of custom Perl (beginning and advanced), CGI, TCL, and a few others, all of which were outstanding. These are the guys that wrote Hacking Linux Exposed and I recently got Open Source Web Development with LAMP that is just excellent, and really mirrors their training skills.

I don't know if they do classes outside of Motorola (their web page seems to indicate they do), but I'd highly recommend them.

In general, if you work at a big enough company, they probably have good internal training classes available, or can send you to classes that are good outside.

I'd be wary trying to pick one on your own, though. I had very bad luck with some "big names" like Learning Tree which seem to just cobble together classes quickly, and try to debug them with you as the guinea pigs at hundreds of dollars a pop.

Apple's technical training is hands-on

[plsuh]

I'm a curriculum developer for Apple's Technical Training and Certification department, and I also act as the backup sysadmin for our Reston, VA training center. All of our courses are hands-on using serious equipment, with an iBook laptop and a G4 tower at each student station, along with a G4 tower for the instructor and possibly also (depending on the class) an XServe rackmount, a Windows 2000 Server, and Solaris servers, all networked together.

The classes run three to five days, each day covering on average three chapters. Each chapter consists of an instructor presentation for about 30 minutes, followed by a student exercise that runs between an hour to two hours. As you can see from the time involved, our approach definitely emphasizes the hands-on aspects.

I can tell you as one of the people who both writes and teaches Apple's courses, most people will zone out if they have to listen to the instructor for more than 30 minutes. At the technical training level, I can't imagine sitting through a straight lecture class for a whole day without a hands-on piece, and really retaining very much of the content.

--Paul

Paul Suh
Curriculum Developer
Technical Training and Certification
Apple Computer
psuh at apple dot com

Unix/Linux Training

[mark*workfire]

Global Knowledge has some pretty good training courses. I haven't taken any of the Unix/Linux courses, but their Cisco courses have bene informative.

Their Unix/Linux catalog is here http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/category.a sp?pageid=9&methodid=c&catid=199&country=United+St ates&translation=English

Red Hat

[fulldecent]

Rad Hat has some nice certification programs that seem to be versatile and respectable: RHCE

Guru Labs

[Derek]

They had some pretty good hands-on courses when I last checked (about 1 year ago) and their instructors are top notch.

GuruLabs

-Derek

Community Colleges *can* be good.

[python eatery]

If you live in a largeish city, then you probably have a few community colleges. One of these probably has a good CS department that may have some good classes for you. You can usually take classes ad-hoc, you don't need to be a full time student or anything. They may have evening or weekend classes, but I prefer to take them during business hours and have my job pay for them.

Community colleges often are trying to give you real world skills you can use today, and are a good bet if you have one with competant CS instructors. Don't take anything where it's more theory than practice though, such as at a real college where they want you to have tons of unnecessary (in the real world) prereqs first.