Question:
Anyone know of any good UNIX courses being offered in the northwest
metro or downtown Minneapolis area? I am looking for night classes,
about 2-3 nights a week.
I believe the local network of county community colleges have such courses.
Answer:
Shop wisely. There are several community or technical colleges that
offer basic UNIX courses, but they aren't all that educational, IMO.
I've taken UNIX courses at both the Minneapolis Technical College
and Hennepin Technical College, and was fairly disappointed with
both. However, the instruction at Hennepin Technical College was
fairly adequate (i.e. the instructor knew his way around a kernel),
while the instruction at Minneapolis Technical College was horrible
and overly simplified. I quit the class and got a partial refund on it
after realizing that several of the students knew more than the
instructor about UNIX.
Since I already had a background of having worked with Solaris (albeit
on a fairly limited basis) in the past, and having set up a few personal Linux
flavors in my spare time over the years, I found that most of these UNIX
teachers, and courses, are really only offering very basic information and
instruction in these quick basic night courses.
You might be better off downloading a flavor of Linux (yes, for the purists
out there, it's NOT the same thing as UNIX, but close enough to learn
some basics on, IMO), and a book or two on Unix and teach yourself.
Set up an Apache Web server, play with user permissions, install a few
apps, and rebuild the kernel a few times. That'll probably give you more
real world hand's on experience than any UNIX 101 at the local tech
schools.
If you're serious about learning it, then maybe something like the
certificate program at the University (which actually gets into the
useful, in-depth, training on shell programming, network
administration, etc.) for UNIX might be a good option to consider.
They even offer the evening/weekend courses you're looking
for.
Think twice about the community/technical college route.
