Review: Training With Stephen Walther
04 Apr 2008I just finished a four day course on AJAX, LINQ, & MVC taught by Stephen Walther and wanted to let all of you know that if you are interested in training on any of these topics, I HIGHLY recommend Stephen.
You can learn more about the training options he offers by visiting his training website: http://www.superexperttraining.com/
He also keeps a blog filled with incredibly information -- and long ;-) -- posts on various aspects of ASP.Net at: http://weblogs.asp.net/StephenWalther/
Read on for more details about my experiences this week.
The Instructor
Stephen is a successful author, having literally "written the book" on ASP.Net (and even ASP Classic!). His book "ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed" has received excellent reviews from Amazon and I look forward to reading it soon.
You can buy Stephen's book from Amazon here:
We all found Stephen to be very personable and he obviously has an excellent command on the language and tools available in the .Net ecosystem. Also, anyone that can put up with my constant interruptions and derails for four days in a windowless classroom is clearly a pro. =)
The Course
Danny Douglass originally contacted Stephen to request that he teach a class for seven of our developers at the organization we work for. Stephen was kind enough to then customize a course around the technologies we had requested, and that is how we ended up with a one day primer on LINQ & MVC followed by an in-depth training session on AJAX technologies and Microsoft's ASP.Net AJAX implementation specifically.
As anyone that reads my blog regularly knows, I am heavily invested in learning the MVC framework and was highly impressed by Stephens grasp on such a new technology. We may very well have been the first ASP.Net MVC class that anyone has taught anywhere and Stephen managed to teach it quickly and confidently. I was also impressed that he was teaching us things based upon the Preview 2 release of the MVC framework which has only been available publicly for 3 weeks rather than the older December CTP release.
As someone that considers himself a strong JavaScript developer, I came into the class a little worried that the JavaScript explanation portions of the program would be more remedial than I wanted. I was wrong. Stephen led a thorough review over the advanced JavaScript features developers need to know to develop world-class AJAX libraries and did so while keeping the pace brisk and managing not to leave anyone in the room behind.
As I said above, I recommend Stephen's training courses to anyone organization interested in learning AJAX, JavaScript, MVC, LINQ, or ASP.Net in general. Thanks for the excellent class Stephen!
Disclaimer: I was not paid or compensated in any way for this endorsement.