In addition to what suaveant said and AssFace wrote...

Learning is fast, efficient, and enjoyable if the course is being taught by an instructor who can and who knows the material. Otheriwise, instructor-lead learning is utter waste of resourses, and leads to dissapointment and "buyer's remorse". Remorse... more so when one is taking a course, by choice, in one's own time, and pulling out of the course does not get you any amount of refund.

Rant follows...

Background: i have been programming in procedural languages more than 3-4 years; self taught Perl, Rexx, bourne shell, JavaScript, etc. Though i already have some Java books, haven't used until i took the course. I am currently on a lazy horizon expanding mission.

I took courses two -- introductory and advanced, intermediate really -- in C++ (Hagerstown Community College, Hagerstown, MD) and one in Java (Shepherd College, Shepherdstown, WV). Along w/ the textbook for C++, i also bought other good C++ books; similarly for Java. Instructor for C++ course was great (see above) and text book good enough. The course being taught what was given in the course blurb.

In total contrast, Java textbook -- Java Software Solutions, 3d ed. -- was geared toward first time programmers in any language (Core Java, 2d ed., is much better in comparison). The handouts had unsused imported classes, unused variables, and plain grammatical mistakes including incomplete sentences. The handouts were too long for rest of the class to be able to both type it and comprehend just what they were writing. The result was slow progress like molasses in winter.

Mind you, this course was supposed to be an advanced course in languge concepts; it turned in to a introductory programming course. After all that, i still hold hope somebody would be able to share some non-trivial Java knowledge and enlightenment someday.

In reply to Re: Difference in self v/s instructor based Perl training by parv
in thread Difference in self v/s instructor based Perl training by artist

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