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.
Note that, while a very good read, the one written by Mitnick does not every talk about his actual exploits/social engineering, because he is barred from "profiting from his crimes" (and writing about them counts) for a few more years still.
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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.
Note that, while a very good read, the one written by Mitnick does not every talk about his actual exploits/social engineering, because he is barred from "profiting from his crimes" (and writing about them counts) for a few more years still.
But it's still a great read.