In a couple of weeks, I'm off to Raleigh, North Carolina for my third consecutive year of a week's worth of training with Chander Ganeson at The Open Technology Group.
The training you receive for the price that you pay is incomparable, especially when you realize the the reasonable fee includes air fare and a week in a decent hotel! The hotel is within easy walking distance, and so is a nice mall and a bunch of restaurants. I never bother to rent a car.
I have personally taken the introductory PHP course and the AJAX programming with PHP course.
I have also taken (elsewhere) the basic CCNA course that Cisco offers. I would compare the quality of that course as dead even with what Chander offers. The difference is that the Cisco course costs more. And that does NOT include any sort of travel arrangements.
Sure, there are some apples and oranges stuff going on here. Networking fundamentals have nothing to do with web development. But that is really meaningless here, as technological training is judged by what you know and put into practice afterwards.
I have had lots of training, including the Red Hat prep course for the RCHT test, an advanced security boot camp, Cisco's Building Multilayer Switched Networks, and a few others. But I consider Cisco's introductory course as one of the top three overall experiences I've had in schooling, along with the two OTG offerings.
Chander keeps his classes small. That ensures lots of time can be spent on each student, if necessary. He uses O'Reilly textbooks, as well as his own course material that he puts together himself.
And the man is an amazing well of knowledge in the fields that he teaches. he can whip out a complex PHP class (the programming object, not the school version) on a whiteboard in a few minutes. And he also shows you how you can do it too.
I have built a whole bunch of PHP apps using Dreamweaver to handle the database connections for me, and plugging in the code for dynamically generated data. It works, but it's sort of like driving a car with no idea of what is under the hood.
Since attending the basic PHP course two years ago, I have weaned myself off of Dreamweaver's handholding, instead preferring to write out my own SQL queries and looping through the results.
This is a giant leap for someone who never thought he had the right mindset for programming. Plus, if I can break free from Dreamweaver altogether, I can take Windows completely out of the equation when I'm developing web apps. I can also save the price of the next $400 software license.
So if you're a geek lucky enough to be able to pick out his own company-sponsored training, or if you want the highest possible return on your own valuable dollars, this three-time (and counting) customer heartily recommends The Open Technology Group.
