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Bill Brown

A complicated man.

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All that we’ve got left to cover is “Win32/COM Interoperation” and so I figure I’m far enough along to assess the quality of this training (heck, I’ve already completed the instructor evaluations).

This is, without a doubt, the best training I’ve ever been to. The four instructors (Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, Jason Whittington, and Mike Woodring, in order of my personal preference) have all written books—except Jason Whittington—and they’re all quite expert in everything .NET. By and large, they treated all questions as serious and seemed genuinely interested in making sure that the students understood what they were teaching. While this is everything you’d expect in a teacher, most training is taught by training monkeys with little professional experience and no authors. I’m sure they’d like you to learn but their level of learning is pretty low, so you pretty quickly surpass them.

The material is pretty advanced stuff, too. There is so much they covered that went right over my head. But I know that, when the time comes, I’ll be able to consult the training materials and grok the concepts pretty quickly. Plus, I’ve got an excellent foundation on which to build my knowledge. Far too often, when broaching a new subject, I read in a contextual vacuum and so the path to knowledge is far more arduous than it needs to be. By having some context with which to approach a topic, you can deal with the new material comfortably. This course will provide that context for the areas of knowledge with which I am unfamiliar.

I would recommend DevelopMentor courses from my experience with this course alone. I’m sure that the rest meet or exceed the bar set by Guerrilla .NET.

(NOTE: The DevelopMentor people also have made available the book Essential XML Quick Reference for free. Excellent!)