Re: Ideas for my site/workbook

From: Davids (nowhere_at_nowthere.com)
Date: 08/02/04 

Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 13:08:50 -0700

Xavier Pacheco wrote:

> I'd like to gather your thoughts on what I'm intending to do for my
> site to support the book. I've have the url delphiguru.com (which I'm
> ...
> What are your thoughts? Feasible? Please be honest. I have to decide
> whether I create a static site to support my book, or if I put a lot of
> time into this. If I get positive feedback on this, I'm wondering
>
> - how do I discourage piracy on my workbook
> - how do I discourage account sharing
> - should I care about the above two items?

The ideas you posted sound interesting. However, I'm not sure they're
realistic. Speaking from my own experience in a wide variety of environments,
I'd say that the longest period of time I was ever given to learn something new
was about two months before I was expected to start showing something useful
from my newfound knowledge. Your comments imply a six- to nine-month learning
period, in "real-time" terms. I suppose this might be useful for some people
ramping up with .NET, but where I work now, we're still working with D6 and
trying to figure out if and when we even WANT to migrate to .NET. I'm lucky to
get a few days to try on something new and make it useful.

The subject of "piracy" is touchy. I'm not sure I've ever worked somewhere that
is has NOT happened (in the context of training materials). The reason,
ostensibly, is that people are loathe to pay a lot of money for stuff that's
perceived to be of "transitory" benefit. If a project has 10 people who need to
learn something, they pay for materials for the "gurus" and make copies for the
rest. This includes both on-site and off-site training, meaning that they'll
pay to send a few project gurus to an off-site training course and then when
they return they'll make copies of their materials and reproduct parts of the
course on-site for the other team members. This is very common.

Another annoying cost- and time-saving technique is to skip the exercises. I
did some consulting at a place that paid several thousand dollars (maybe 10k+)
to bring in an expensive firm to do C++ training. They had the trainers skin
the material to the bone and eliminate all of the programming exercises. The
also brought in a few "unannounced" developers to "sit- in" on the training (and
for whom they made unauthorized copies of materials later). I stayed on
afterwards to make sure they were actually getting some benefit from this
expenditure. Needless to say, none of the people who attended this course
gained any benefit from it at all; I was increasingly criticized for constantly
talking about "classes" and "object models" and trying to get them to re-design
their system (which is what I was supposedly hired to do). In the end, they
decided the training company was crap, I was incompetent, and used that as their
excuse to abandon their use of C++ and OOD/OOP on their project.

I'd LIKE to say that if training companies priced their services lower, then
companies would pay for more copies, but I'm not sure that's realistic. Company
executives are greedy, and given a chance to get more bang for their buck, they
wouldn't necessarily pay for more people to get the same course -- rather,
they'd probably spend the "savings" on an additional course.

Here's a thought...

put something on your web site that is sort of a cross between a tutorial and a
test. Present material and exercises, and provide a way to have exercises
integrated INTO the web environment. Once someone has passed some point,
disable access to some of the tutorial material and REPLACE it with access to
reference material. (eg, they would have to post code that gets run on your
server that, when successful, triggers a change in the environment. Or, make
part of the objective of each exercise to "climb a ladder", and make earlier
steps disappear as new ones are reached.)

This might be more interactive than you were thinking, but it would certainly
solve the piracy problem.

-David

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