COMMON is first rate education, but expensive.
Many local user groups are members of COMMON.
So by paying under $ 50.00 to join a local user group, your company is now
also a member of COMMON, which has various educational opportunities around
the year, not just at the major conference.
Some of the user groups also have educational conferences.
It has been years since I used the IBM Education Card,
but it was GREAT
I used it at technical conferences.
I used it at places where IBM was not part of the name of the school ...
various 3rd party places doing i/400 education would accept the IBM card
I used it at IBM sponsored classes at major universities
The IBM education web site has guidance what classes to take in what
sequence ... if you coming to the i from z, 36, Unix, whatever other
environment ... if your responsibilities are to be Sys Admin, programming,
operations, security, whatever, what classes are reccommended in what
sequence.
The Card does have an expiration ... it is only good for a particular time
frame, and to be used by one person.
When you begin to look over the documentation titles, watch out for RED
BOOKS. I don't know if you have this on the z, but IBM manuals come in 2
flavors on the i. There are WHITE BOOKS and RED BOOKS.
White Books are written by the developers of some product or tool ... a
reference book for people working with a particular programming language,
communications, security, backup, whatever.
Red Books are written by people in the field ... You want to do X. What's
the best way to get the job done, from perspective of across all languages,
tools, resources available from IBM and its partners?
Something else you might look for ... IBM frequently organizes a "road show"
nationwide to announce the latest hardware / OS releases which include IBM
partners displaying what they can do. This is a great place to take your
non-technical managers to see what can be done with the platform, and with
various languages. Some people can have a mind set based on what used to be
possible, impractical etc. ... This can be done in COBOL but not in RPG &
vica versa, we use Windoze for this, 400 for that, then reality changes, but
the mind set making the decisions does not, until they see one of
these "road shows."
Al Macintyre
, Dan Kimmel wrote
That "education card" can be used for COMMON conference registration,
too. If you've been to a SHARE conference you'll be right at home at
the COMMON annual conference in Reno in April.
midrange.com
