I got my AAS from St. Paul Tech. The teacher to avoid would be Warren Shaffer. Wonderful guy but he can be unpredictable and deviates from the syllabus all the time. I had him for many of my programming classes. Every class, except for the last one I had, started 15 to 20 minutes late. The last one started on time because he scheduled it to start 20 minutes after the "official" start time. I did have him for C++ and he shined in that class. St. Paul Tech offers a UNIX class, I took it. It just covered the basics. John Miller Dain Rauscher Inc. Application Services IS Capital Markets Phone 612-547-7573 Fax 612-547-7580 -----Original Message----- From: Liz Burke-Scovill [mailto:kethry at winternet.com] Sent: Saturday, December 23, 2000 6:16 PM To: tclug-list at lists.real-time.com Subject: [TCLUG] Schools and Programming - Java class review. St. Paul Tech - it's part of my C++/Java Programmer's certificate. I just finished Java Programming 1 - I wanted to wait until I have more practical experience before taking Java Programming 2 - besides I havne't started on the C/C++ track yet and that's core to the certificate. Anyway... I don't know much else about the other teachers there but I really liked the Java class that Ken Krutsch taught. For one, instead of the Java in 21 Days-like books that the other instructors chose, Ken chose the Java Programming book published by Sun. Supposedly he was supposed to teach towards certification, but as he said on day 1, he wouldn't get to teach us as much as he did, and besides, we wouldn't remember it after the exam anyway. So...the first half of the semester was spent learning the basic language elements, installing compiling, running Java programs that speak with the command prompt as opposed through a GUI, etc...the second half of the course went through discussing probably the more important API's - java.awt.*, javax.swing.*, multithreading, streams, servlets, etc... He's been programming for about 15 years professionally, and picked up Java when the white paper was released. Since Java came out, he's been professionally programming it, usually as a consultant, and usually as the person they called to clean up code. What this meant was a) there were times where he was difficult to understand but he really gave us a good core understanding of the language - where it came from, how it can be implemented, and how to write things different ways - always emphasizing error handling and non-spaghetti code. Let's see - on the linux side - well, he's a unix guy from way back, so would give us all of the cool tips and tools - which wouldn't run on Windows - because he uses linux primarily at home - for those that had to use windows, he provided us with links to unix shell programs that allowed you to use your command prompt as if you were in unix - and could use vi, emacs, etc...was pretty cool - unfortunately he didn't give instructions on how to install them, and much of the software provided I didn't have time to fiddle and play with until I could get it to work - not with two kids and full time job in addition to WAY TOO MANY outside interests like Renn Fest, etc., but I digress.... I spent the first half of the semester wondering if I would even pass the class as this was my first programming class in 10 years...and I didn't do well on the test, but what I found was no matter what I did on the tests, I came away with a really thorough understanding of the language (I did Ace the final, btw) - and was able to use it in my job to analyze a rather large web based application... Soooooooooo.....the long and the short of it is - if you can ever take a class by Ken Krutsch - definitely do so... Liz On Sat, 23 Dec 2000, grey Moon-Wolf wrote: > > --- Liz Burke-Scovill <kethry at winternet.com> wrote: > > > > I'm starting my C++ class next month if that counts > > ;)... > > > > Liz > Liz, > Where are you taking C++? Just curious... - Manuel > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Shopping - Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. > http://shopping.yahoo.com/ > _______________________________________________ > tclug-list mailing list > tclug-list at lists.real-time.com > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -- Imagination is intelligence having fun... e-mail: kethry at winternet.com URL: http://WWW.winternet.com/~kethry/index.html _______________________________________________ tclug-list mailing list tclug-list at lists.real-time.com https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list