You heard it right, folks. I’ll be in lovely downtown Chicago for two weeks. Actually, I’m teaching 4 classes, each one consisting of a week’s worth of half-day sessions. 1 beginner course, two intermediate courses, and an advanced course. I’ll also be returning in February to do an intermediate and advanced course. This was the result of a successful full-week course I delivered in NYC that was 5 full days of advanced Linux training. Of course, what’s beginner and what’s advanced, I’ve learned, varies very widely among training clients. The beginner course I’m teaching next week is geared toward power users of other OSes, so I can assume a lot of basic high-level knowledge, while another beginner course I’m doing in Feb or March for a different client assumes that the user is not even very advanced at being a Windows end user!
What determines “advanced” is different too. Once you are “Advanced”, you can be advanced in different aspects and usage scenarios. The advanced course I’m teaching one client is dealing very heavily with two main areas: scripting/data munging, and system profiling and performance. An odd mix, but I do custom content development for on-site training clients, unless I have existing modules covering the topics they need, in which case they can pick and choose to put together their course, or have me query them for information and put together a proposed package.
There’s still one nagging issue with my Linux training handout. The content is good. I’ve gotten good feedback on it from some sharp people. However, I’m using OpenOffice to put it all together, and I’m having a bear of a time putting together a good index. My belief is that all indexes, for all books, are lacking, but this goes beyond that into “wtf?”-space. The main problem is that the index generating tool in OOo lets you say that this word should be matched on the “Whole word”, but that’s the exact opposite of what I need. What that feature does is it only puts a page listing in the index if the *entire word* exists on that page. What I need is an option that says something like “standalone”, where the page isn’t listed unless the word is surrounded by a word boundary on either side. You’d be shocked at how many everyday words contain standard Linux commands in them. “rm” and “ls” are particularly troublesome. Almost every page would be listed in the index! If anyone has tips on external tools or other OOo techniques, definitely leave links or comments!!
At some point, probably while I’m in Chicago holed up in a hotel, I’ll post the modules I have put together so far on the web site of my business that I perform training out of (I have a one-man LLC these days).