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After some years out of IT, I decided to return. I know the basics but need to refresh with the latest. I last created a website under HTML4 and CSS2, so you can see how out of date I am. Plus I need to get a CompTIA A+, which seems to be the drivers license in IT now.
I signed up to a popular, paid, online training site, but was soon disappointed. The "courses" were offered by genuine experts, but consisted pretty much entirely of videos and nothing more. Also, the videos didn't seem to constitute any kind of curriculum. If you go to standard college, they tell you which set of courses major you in accounting as opposed to the set of courses that major you in marketing. I didn't find this on the online training site, even though it boasts of offering "paths" of learning. The paths turned out to be simply groupings of courses according to subject.
Then I discovered the "developer" subdomains of well-known vendors, and I think they are an unsung resource. I'm now working through the web development course at developer.mozilla.org, and it's great! It consists of a mix of reading, videos, and most importantly, exercises and skill assessments. There's also a forum where you can ask for help, and the volunteers are very helpful. I checked other vendors, like Microsoft and Oracle, and they too have developer sites.
What's been your experience with online technical training?
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People seem to find some common shortcomings in the online training offerings, among them, that the material is too basic, and that there is little interactivity in the way of exercises, projects, forums, etc. This is too bad. There's no technical reason why it should be so.
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This is good info for us dinosaurs who may want to learn web development. I worked on large, application-specific servers. But web development is now a big thing, and it seems to be a total cluster-elephant (elephant being this site's euphemism for four-letter words). If ever I decide to delve into it because I want more trouble in my life, it's good to have an idea where to start.
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If it's online it isn't training. It may be indoctrination.
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What's the difference? 
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I signed up with Packt a few months ago and have enjoyed it. I dislike video because I can't really skip to the parts I need and it is harder to follow along by doing.
Packt is mostly books but there are some videos.
Jack of all trades, master of none, though often times better than master of one.
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I had not heard of Pakt. I'm going over their website. I too like books more than video.
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Packt is very inexpensive if you get their annual membership. But I have found you get what you pay for. I had the membership for 1 year and read many of their books. But they are nowhere close to the value of college textbooks despite being 1/20th the cost (per book). I found that most of their books appear to be written by "non-experts" who look to be sharing what they have learned so far on their journey and mistakenly believe that they have an understanding of the scope to properly create such material. An easy mistake to make since we don't know what we don't know.
On the other hand, I am currently working through a college textbook. The book I am reading now cost more than the entire year of packt unlimited reading. BUT, it is many times the value and taking far longer to read and work through the assignment to ensure I have mastered the material. I had read a book claiming to cover some of the same material from Packt. At the time I thought I was learning this material. But in the end I was left with tidbits of knowledge I didn't have before but zero mastery over the domain I had read the book for.
In the end, if you are attempting to master a topic that others have mastered, I think you need to get material and a curriculum from an organization that both has mastery of that topic and taken the time to work through how to get someone from a starting point to an ending point. Most Packt books I have read are equivalent to having a long lunch with someone who presumably knows more than you about a subject, but is not necessarily an authority on the subject, and having them give you bits of advice that may improve your skills in some way, but not give you expertise or a plan as to how to become an expert. On the other hand, it is a lighter experience for those not motivated enough for university level learning but who do want to improve. i.e. better than doing nothing.
You might also decide to read RFCs. These can be long and dry, but will leave you with expert knowledge.
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If you knew how Packt treated their authors you would be less surprised. O'Reilly is probably a better resource for the most sophisticated reader, but they are more expensive too.
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Oh boy where to start on that one.....
ex Packt Author here!!!!
I will NEVER, EVER, EVER work with them again.... terrible experience.
All they are interested in is
1) Step by Step guides that require no thinking for NON ENGLISH speakers, written by English speakers
2) Profit, Profit and more profit.
I was supposed to be working on a book for .NET Core 3.1, which was still in production 6 months after it shipped, and was cancelled 3 months later because they couldn't decide on the content for the chapters.
I was routinely asked to include "content that would sell" rather than "Content that would teach", I wrote most of my chapters to take the reader on a journey into the technology and encourage them to experiment with the technique's I was teaching, but all Packt wanted was "1) do this, 2) do that, 3) do the other 4) do something else", "now use that template over and over again to always make the same thing"
I was routinely asked to include things that had nothing to do with Dot Net Core because it was all buzzwords, for example I git asked to remove the chapter on using the .NET Cryptographic API's and replace it with a chapter all about "Cloud Native".
I may in time gather my thoughts and write another .NET/C# based book, but if I do I will most likely self publish, because looking from the outside in, and speaking to other authors there's very little difference with most publishers.
The only eBook publisher I've actually enjoyed working for over the years is Syncfusion. EVERY SINGLE BOOK they publish is free to download. I've written 8 titles for them in the last 10 years or so, and am currently on doing an updated bootstrap book for Bootstrap V5 which I hope to get done this year.
Following that, are plans for an updated Postgres book, focusing on using Postgres specifically with .NET
Sorry that turned into a bit of a rant.... wasn't intended 
I'll leave the "well known paid for video tutorial site author" story for another day
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Packt is mostly an India company. They're fishing for profit in a very cost-sensitive pond.
My experience was more that Packt didn't have the faintest idea what they wanted. They demanded drafts on a very tight time schedule, then spent weeks and weeks on the copy-editing, which was nit-picky. Their editing broke the Word document each time, as if they'd exported to another tool and imported the result. I think there were six rounds of editing in all. Then they imported the result to another tool to produce galleys, which we had to edit as PDFs. Ugh!
The folks who solicited me to write for Packt were English, and very nice. But they handed off to Packt's India tentacle, who seemed to think authors were their personal slaves.
My O'Reilly book has made me about $23k over five years. I've yet to see a dime from the Packt book.
Live and learn.
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Yep, I had the same experience with their editing team.
At one point they tried to make me use this god awful tool on-line in a browser to edit my copy, it was horrendous.
I later found out from another source, the reason they wanted to use the online tool was because they had complete control of it, they didn't like sharing manuscripts via sources they couldn't lock up at a moments notice should they wish to.
I didn't get the slave treatment though, but over the course of a year and a half they assigned me 3 different copy editors, all of which had completely different ideas on layout, style and wording
I did start an approach with APress on a project, but they disappeared and ghosted me after the first 3 meetings, never tried O'Reily but I have been told in the past if I work with any of the top tier I.T. publishers, they are the best of the bunch.
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So, my experience was in 2018-19. When was yours?
O'Reilly has an online tool called Atlas, but Atlas is pretty wonderful.
There's some author evangelist from Packt India sending me emails promising to make everything better for future authors. I wished him luck, but said it was too late to improve my bad interactions with Packt. There are just so many authors who have had bad experiences with Packt, I wonder how they get new content.
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Mid 2016 thru to mid 2018, but I heard plenty bad stuff before that, yet still elected to work with them against my better judgement, only when they realised they where not going to release the book on the exact same day core 3.1 dropped did they try to wise up.
If the headhunter is Alok Dhuri, tell him Shawty says hi and where's my whiskey
As for new content, if you look at many of the new titles all the author names are indian. There's very few now that are not.
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You start as a specialist and evolve into a generalist, and then find there are now multiple specialties.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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I feel that any training, online or offline is like a springboard, familiarizing one with the buzzwords and showing a few levels of "Hello World" projects.
The actual learning starts after the training ends.
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Amarnath S wrote: I feel that any training, online or offline is like a springboard, familiarizing one with the buzzwords and showing a few levels of "Hello World" projects.
The actual learning starts after the training ends.
I agree. All the reading and watching and lecturing are just preparation -- the "doing" brings the basics together, and then growth begins from that foundation.
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They can only really teach the basics because developer work is so fractured in terms of what's available. There are dozens of languages, and hundreds of platforms and libraries that "make your job easier". There's no way anyone can teach that.
The rest of what you learn is from experience that you gain from having to perform certain programming tasks and the tools that you are required to use to perform those tasks. Many of those considerations are determined by the company you work for.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Yes, that's good insight. Even as a hobby, everything I've coded has involved different things.
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There are now numerous ways one can learn to develop web applications, making this part of the development profession quite daunting for new comers.
Right now you have the following options to choose from...
Java Servlets
Java Framework
Pure PHP
Microsoft.NET PeachPie PHP Extension for Visual Studio (makes your PHP source-less)
Microsoft ASP.NET MVC
Microsoft ASP.NET Blazor Client-Side
Microsoft ASP.NET Blazor Server-Side
HTML, CSS, JavaScript combos
To get up and running quickly, Pure PHP is probably the best and easiest route to take. PHP web development makes up to close to 30% of all web sites today. W3 Online Schools probably have the best a basic courses of anyone (read and try with their built in editors... https://www.w3schools.com/
Next up, I would recommend Microsoft ASP.NET Blazor Server-Side as this is a very credible framework to work with. There is a lot of available information on the Internet but probably the best place to start is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/?view=aspnetcore-6.0
Note that all of the Microsoft web development options have become overly complex over the years but if you want to work with such an implementation, ASP.NET Blazor Server-Side will keep you primarily in the PHP-like camp. Blazor is only supported by C#, which is not as difficult to learn as C\C++.
Finally, the messy route is the HTML, CSS, JavaScript combination. HTML is still the markup language that display's web pages, while CSS is still the standard for styling these pages. Both of these technologies are used in all of the technologies listed above.
It is JavaScript that the professional community has a love-it or hate-it relationship with. I am one of those who despises the language. To begin with, internally it is a mess and the standards committee has never seen fit to have it cleaned up. Next, its syntax has become increasingly arcane as anything you will come across in any of the major development languages. And if you use JavaScript components and frameworks, you are probably going to experience conflicts among them making your debugging life a nightmare. Finally, the language never feels as if it is a mature and stable environment. This is most likely a result of the fact that the language was never designed to support how it is being used today. As a result, vendors have created frameworks to make using the raw language easier such as Microsoft's, "TypeScript".
It is also highly insecure, like everything else that is focused on client-side development.
However, this combination of technology skills can all be learned at the W3 Schools mentioned above.
Right now, I am researching techniques for the development of a multi-user application based off of my current desktop application for document management. If I wasn't so invested in my Microsoft skills, I would definitely go with Pure PHP as it is an equivalent to the Classic ASP development we did on the Internet in the 1990s and early 2000s but now more powerful.
But being a Microsoft software engineer, I am currently looking at Blazor Server-Side to see how close I can make it to the original ASP.NET WebForms model, which to me was the zenith of web development environments due to its greater ease-of-learning and powerful capabilities.
ASP.NET WebForms is still available in the older, standard .NET Frameworks but is not recommended for new development.
ASP.NET Blazor Server-Side however, is getting rather close to a modern reincarnation of the WebForms model. However, more refinements are required for the implementation of pre-built components so that they are easier to use. Right now, working with some of them can drive a person to drink...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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Thanks for the recommendations!
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EDIT 2: I DID IT. THIS ROCKS
I'm not entirely sure how they do it. The code is a labyrinth - it has over 100 contributors.
Alpha blending without hardware acceleration is slow because you have to read from the source pixel by pixel, blend each pixel with the new color, and then write to the the pixel to the destination.
I was doing this naively, but I want to approach LVGL speed. I need to rise to the challenge.
I'm now planning on reading pixels line by line from the display source in batches, then scanning each line, and only reblending if the source color changes when I fill a rectangle.
Filling rectangles is a primitive that almost all drawing operations - including draw-line use so it basically speeds up everything.
To complicate things, I can't guarantee that memory will be available to copy the source line into a buffer, so if it's not I need to fallback to a pixel by pixel read.
Here goes nothing.
Wish me luck. 
Edit: I sped it up some, but it's sped up much more when the draw destination supports direct reads into RAM. However, the display device I'm using this with reads the pixels in 18-bit format rather than 16-bit format and worse, it's padded to 24 bits. That means no matter what I do, I have to convert each pixel to 16-bit anyway. I kind of know how to speed it a little bit even in that case but nowhere near approaching that LVGL demo. It makes me wonder if they aren't doing some sort of faux alpha blending in that demo rather than the real thing. That wouldn't surprise me at all. I have an idea of how to do that anyway.
Real programmers use butterflies
modified 20-Feb-22 10:44am.
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I believe you can do it...
Unless the original code was very good.. but with 100 contributors there is a lot of room for messy useless redundant slow code! 
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I did it man. I'm not sure how it stacks up against LVGL because I still think their demo probably cheats, but I sped it up by orders of magnitude in most situations (as long as it has enough memory to make a temporary bitmap to blend to)
Real programmers use butterflies
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