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

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.

Find a LUG

[reaper20]

Where are people going for this stuff?

A few hours with a LUG will do wonders. Yeah, people harp about 'certs' and 'proper training', but noone knows linux better than the people who love it and are willing to help others.

hands on approach?

[orthogonal]

Recently the topic of getting people trained in the Linux/UNIX environment has troubled me.... What decent training programs out there have a hands on approach?

Well, with linux, you have three choices:

• a turgid man page: it's guaranteed to list every command line switch, and possibly even describe a few of those switches. Unless it's a GNU/utility, in which case you should see the Info page. The Info page is hidden somewhere inside of emacs, which is the real OS.
  
• the source code itself: it's GPL'd after all, and if we have to write it to produce the functionality, you ought to have to read it to use the functionality. Please disregard (but only at your peril) any comments; they're probably out of date, and certainly obscure. Unless the comment mentions "here be dragons" or "may overflow on some architectures".
  
• the hairy ass: kissing the ass of a linux guru will sometimes get you an answer, along with condescension, contempt and strong body odor whilst you're told (between muttered "umask 077" calculations) how it's intuitively obvious.
  

Hands on. Yeh.

Linux is free: download it, install it, disconnect it from the modem until you know what you're doing, and play with it. That's about as hands on as you can get.

Did I mention it's free? And that rabid OS zealots will be more than happy to help you install it if you act at all attracted to the Kool Aid they're pushing? And did I mention it's free?

You haven't seen the worse

[jsse]

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

You know what - THAT's an advanced topics in Microsoft Networking Essential! I once received a call from an MCSE asking me why he couldn't see the domain controller and its neigbours in the Network Neighbourhood. I checked and told him that he's in the wrong domain and he insisted that he's in the right domain because he has typed the correct domain name in the 'NT domain' box something like that. I told him it's the TCP/IP domain we are talking about and the Netbios traffic couldn't passthru the routers. Then he, with pride and professional tone, told me that Netbios is on the top of any networking protocol and devices such that it SHOULD be transparent to Microsoft Network, and that I should look into the problem...

Things go downhill from there.

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