I thought my Google-fu was pretty damn good, but I've searched high and low for reviews of various bootcamps and training courses for software and web development, and I typically come up empty handed.  So now here I am, and I'm trying to start a trend here:  Publish a review when you attend a training course of any kind... Other developers would love to know which ones are high quality, and which are just out to give you the bare minimum for the maximum profit.

To kick things off, here we go:  

I just finished up a 5-day training in Phoenix, Arizona at a training center called Interface Technical Training with renowned development expert Dan Wahlin.  I had been vacillating between that course and a few of the excellent looking courses (also a week long) offered by DevelopMentor, but I found the premise behind the course at Interface to be the most enticing.  I also was able to find tutorials that Dan Wahlin had created up on the web, so I was able to get a sample of his presentation and teaching skills, and they seemed  to be top notch.  In the course, we spent a week going end-to-end with a web app designed with a slew of technologies with significant real world applications in tons of projects a .NET web developer might wind up involved with at any given point in his or her career.  Specifically, I'm talking about creating an ASP.NET app using MVC 4, Entity Framework code first, a sprinkling of SQL Server, Unity for inversion of control, HTML5, JavaScript and a few JavaScript libraries, including jQuery, which is so ubiquitous you are virtually (pun intended) guaranteed to use it in your job as a web developer.

The course itself is called "Building an HTML5 End-to-End Web Application with ASP.NET MVC 4, EF Code First and jQuery", and Dan Wahlin did an outstanding job teaching the class all week long.  It is not a course for beginners... This is a course for software developers with some experience who are looking to level-up their capabilities and their understanding of the technologies they work with every day.  You can even attend remotely with some pretty impressive looking technology to ensure remote students get just as much out of the course as those who attend the physical class.  

The class is fast paced, but not at all brutal.  You'll be there in the classroom from 9am to 4pm each day, with about an hour break for lunch in the middle.  Dan was great with answering everyone's questions, and as one would expect with a reputation like his, he knew his stuff inside and out.  Also noteworthy was that Dan would spend extra time on topics where it was clear the class had lots of interest or questions.  He also made himself available for students to ask questions during breaks or after class whenever questions were highly specific to a student's situation, or too off-topic.  

Overall, I found this training course to be of excellent quality, and it was an honor and a pleasure to get to meet Dan Wahlin and have him answer so many of my questions throughout the week.  Almost none of the technologies we went over were brand new to me, but I know more about every single one of them now, and I have Dan and InterfaceTT to thank.  I would definitely recommend this course to a friend or colleague, and I hope that I have the privilege of returning for further training at InterfaceTT in the future.  It truly seems like a solid operation with quality instructors.

Recently the San Diego Tech Immersion Group (SDTIG) started a new track in learning JavaScript from the very beginning.  What we'll be doing is following the curriculum outlined by a web post found at JavaScriptIsSexy.com.  It looks like it will be a heavier workload than previous tracks, but it will almost certainly be one of the very most rewarding as well.  If you are not familiar with SDTIG, I would highly recommend checking it out and joining up! 

One of the first questions that came up was how one might go about writing some JavaScript code and playing around with it to see how it works and what it does.  There are a LOT of different ways to do this, and there are just as many tools you might use.  Since a lot of the developers in SDTIG are familiar with Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE, I thought it might be useful to have a step-by-step tutorial on setting up a very basic website that would allow someone with just a little Visual Studio knowledge to get up and running in no time.  I hope that some of you will find it useful!  If you have questions or thoughts on how to make this tutorial better, please leave a comment or contact me!

Go grab yourself a caffeinated beverage, fire up Visual Studio, and have a look at this tutorial to start tinkering with JavaScript right away!