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
> 
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-- 
Imagination is intelligence having fun...
e-mail:  kethry at winternet.com
URL:  http://WWW.winternet.com/~kethry/index.html

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