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Ronda Pederson <Next>
Review From Paul Chu
Hi all,
I had a fun week (2/4 - 2/8 ) in the Valley of the Sun, Scottsdale, AZ Comp-USA. This is my assessment of the 5 day ASP.NET class by Charles Carroll.
Everyone was given a nice large tote bag, writing tablet with cover and 6 books.
6 Good Books on ASP.NET were distributed but he consciously avoided specific VB.NET and C#.NET books.
No formalhandouts and syllabus for the 5 day class. Students took their own notes. He did not use Powerpoints (which can be good because it's not scripted teaching ).
The topics were covered in a rather Overview form. Charles would expound on what he thought were the important points and where there was confusion.
He continually mentioned that the details would be the 6 books. There was not much step by step teaching. You are thrown in the "deep end" to figure out how to code something. For example: He asked us to write code to process a flat file containing a questionaire using the NOTEPAD interface. His teaching technique is that you ask questions of him and he will answer but will not show you the step by step process. This is reminiscent of the style of his aspfriends.com Newsgroup. You post a question and experts will answer.
I had some prior preparation in ASP.NET and had no difficulty with taking in the material. The class contained all prior students for ASP classic as well as talented developer Scott Cate and me. I had surveyed the books myself in the bookstores and was happy with his choice of books.
Here are my basic impressions of the class.
Charles is a "human dynamo". He is an engaging and dynamic speaker with a lot of energy and enthusiasm.
He is a "Microsoft Insider" in that he has very good relationship with the ASP.NET team. He has Microsoft Developers participating in his newsgroups.
He has contributed greatly to the ASP community by virtue of his web site and newsgroups.
The class is full of "scoops / anecdotes" about the MS ASP.NET Team and the details of what is going on at MS regarding the new products.
He provides a lot of interesting content and discussion that you will not find elsewhere.
Good programmers vs weak programmers
This was an good class for someone like me. Experienced and looking for the basic differences in .NET. I was able to ask the kind of detail questions that an expert would answer. Students or programmers who are looking structured lectures with followup examples may find this class too advanced. This could have been based on the audience which was primarliy experiencedASP developers. Charles uses examples on his www.learnasp.com site and has some special student links which are generally not available.
The Challenge of a 5 day class.
This is by design a very difficult thing to pull off because topics are covered too quickly and come in fast succession.
Thus, the lectures in general focus on a quick overview and "insights" whereas the real learning is creating your own projects or following the books. Charles focuses on explaining "common misconceptions" and strives to clarify the important points in the technology. Students do work on writing code from scratch and it can be challenging for the uninitiated (i.e. Visual Student dependent people like me). The class coding is done with VB.
4. Charles provides a support infrastructure with the books and thru his newsgroups. Experts are there and a high answer rate percentage. He is providing you with the tools to succeed. He lists the important web sites that contain the best information. The great thing about his class is that he will let you sit in on the next class for ASP V2.0 because you are a former student. Also, students have access to special links which contain better examples.
Overall Evaluation:
For a relative newbie perspective - not confident in web development techniques, this might be too advanced.
For an experienced ASPweb developer, this was a good class because you got inside information and insight into Microsoft plans and focus for .NET. This was an opportunity to discuss and air any issues or opinions about the .NET design and strategy.
I can recommend this class to all who do some prior preparation in ASP.NET to cover some of the basic material first. Then they will have a reference point.
Advantages:
Lots of good information on ASP.NET at microsoft
Focus on the important features in .NET
Advanced tips: such as using Dis-assembler to reverse engineer code
Good Website references
Class has good experienced people in it.
Disadvantages
-may be too advanced for those interested in more structured hands-on teaching.
did not provide VS.NET to use intellisense and power of IDE for Visual Studio buffs.
Other Notes:
Compusa teaching site had problems with Internet connectivity
Charles did buy all the lunches......
Overall grade: A-