About Us: About Our Courses

Training for proficiency's sake.

We love developing software. And we love teaching other developers how to get the most out of current technologies to get amazing things accomplished. The techniques we teach make software development faster, simpler, and more enjoyable, and help make the end product more reliable, and far easier to maintain. However as many of our customers have found, transitioning to a new Java EE or Cocoa technology can often be a little confusing, even for experienced developers.

We Don’t Just Disseminate Knowledge—We Build Proficiency

But with the right kind of training, even a novice can quickly become proficient. In fact, many of our customers tell us that taking classes from About Objects saved months of ramp-up time. Our training courses place the emphasis on doing rather than passively listening to an instructor. In this hands-on, step-by-step approach, each attendee at one of our developer courses begins coding a realistic application from day one.

More Signal, Less Noise

One of the main hurdles to learning any non-trivial new technology is overcoming information overload—’noise’ in effect, that can serve to drown out the ‘signal’—the key concepts students really need to grasp in order to gain proficiency. There's always a blizzard of new terminology and unfamiliar concepts, usually involving dozens of moving parts, making it hard to know where to focus. And available training and documentation is often pitched at the wrong level—either too high–level to provide real insight, or too detailed to give much–needed perspective.

About Objects courses are highly optimized to provide just the right level of detail, and to focus on the skills and knowledge that provide the most bang for the buck. Our courses follow a 'just-in-time' approach to imparting information that helps minimize information overload. They present new subjects in relatively small but complete units that are far easier to assimilate. Whenever we introduce new material, we immediately follow that with a lab session to help attendees ‘lock in’ new concepts and information.

Keeping it Realistic

About Objects lab exercises are carefully designed to allow attendees to build an application with meaningful functionality that incorporates most of the material covered in class. Whenever new information is introduced, we're always careful to show how it's relevant to the application the attendees are building in class—in other words, we always explain why we're introducing a new topic before getting into the details, so attendees see how it will help them accomplish something useful.

As the class progresses, attendees find themselves assembling the simpler components created during earlier labs into working applications. By building an application line–by–line from scratch, attendees gain a comprehensive understanding of its inner workings, hleping them to establish a solid mental map of how all the pieces fit together. And although it might be easier for our curriculum developers to produce simplistic, isolated lab exercises, we know it’s much more useful for students to work on realistic examples. So we spend a good deal of time devising exercises that are challenging without being intimidating, and that give students an opportunity to do the kinds of things they will need to do in real life.

Measure Twice, Learn Once

Another key to successful training is having measurable objectives. For example, a student in our Introduction to Struts 1.x class must write write a working, non–trivial Struts application in order to successfully complete the course. The lab exercises that are woven through the course are designed not only to help cement knowledge, but also to give the instructor constant feedback on each individual student’s progress to help ensure their success in meeting the course objectives.

The About Objects Advantage

We are in the training business because, as developers ourselves, we love sharing what we’ve learned about the technology, the software development life cycle, and the latest developer tools. We love helping other developers learn new things and and not just accumulate superficial knowledge, but gain real proficiency.

So what does this mean for you? Well, training can be costly: apart from the tuition fees, there’s the cost of lost productivity when people are away from projects attending training programs. To be truly worthwhile, training must reward you with significant gains in productivity. And quite frankly, not all training courses do that. So it makes sense to shop around for the best training available. Take a look at our syllabus, talk to our customers, and decide for yourself where your training budget and your time will best be spent.