On with my preparations for the suspected tapering off of my role at my current main client, first part…TRAINING
Training is one of the things that all techs like to do differently, personally i like a combination of videos i can have on repeat in the background and building practical apps to solve problems. but their are some core bits that i recon that everyone on a training frenzy should have
1) vmware workstation (or virtual box or parallels or what ever rocks your boat), if your not using virtual machines, then start!!, with them you can mess about and try things, then bin them when they go wrong, top tip: build a ‘core machine’ and clone it each time you want to play with something new, that way you don’t waste time building up the base OS each time you want to try something.
2) http://www.safaribooksonline.com , the cheapest and best way to get at all the technical books you could want for one price, they also have a really good line in videos included in the price, yes i know all about the practical side being the important, but as i have discovered with flex and spring, that just because you are making it work does not mean you are doing it right, so OFFICIALY RATIFIED base theory is needed as well (especially for interviews), understandably safari had “stuff all” new Domino training material, but all is not lost (more on that later),
now on the to individual things i have to learn
Flex 4 and Adobe Air
Thankfully this is as easy as ever with adobe really leading the way when it comes to documentation, all varieties of learning stuff can be found at http://flex.org/resources with my personal fav being the “flex in a week” video and work sheets (already updated for flex 4) found at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/
Xpages
Next up is xpages, now i hear there is a book coming form the powers at IBM, but alas i cant wait, and actually i don’t have to (ha ha!), because there is good resources out there from the community, the 2 important ones being:
http://xpages101.net/ (a paid for video training site produced by Matt White who co wrote IBMs internal xpages training course,and has presented on xpages at every ‘lug’ and notes conference you can mention, the content is excellent though as i know Matt as a mate I’m always the expecting him to say at the end of each lesson “so that’s done, shall we go for a pint”),
http://xpagesblog.com/ (a community technical blog that is stuffed full of juicy xpages bits and an excellent read)
There is also a spectacular 40+ series of xpages articles that i have lost the link to (will dig up and update here)
Granite Data services
This is just a “just build the darn thing and make it work” job but to my relief the guys and gals at http://www.graniteds.org have written very good documentation thank you, found at http://www.graniteds.org/confluence/display/DOC/Documentation+-+2.1
Jquery
God damn where to start, hundreds of good sources, lots of them free, but of them all i ended up with the purchased book “JQUERY: NOVICE TO NINJA” found at http://www.sitepoint.com/books/jquery1/ then worked my way thought the some usefull looking jquery pluggins taking them apart ( http://www.gmarwaha.com/jquery/jcarousellite/ and http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-validation/ )
Spring
This is such a hideous subject, that you just have go to http://www.safaribooksonline.com and look thought all the myriad spring books they have until you find one you like the style off, then sit down with a pack of head ache tablets and grind your way through it, you will swear a lot, then suffer an moment of Epiphany after which its just a case of filling in the mad java developer “lets make this elegant” gaps.
Adobe illustrator
Strangely Adobe aren’t as good on this as they are on flex (maybe because they have everyone by the short an curlies on it as a market leader) so its back to http://www.safaribooksonline.com where there is a excellent video series and the normal good books, practice practice party people
Android dev
This is a bit like jquery in that there is simply tones of content, I’m going to use a mixture of http://developer.android.com and http://www.safaribooksonline.com content combined with practice apps ( although as i don’t have a android phone I’m using the a vmware image of the live android image http://code.google.com/p/live-android/, thanks to the wretch for pointing this one out)
Right, back to work!!