Re: marketing a perl class

On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 01:52:53PM -0500, Uri Guttman wrote:
> >>>>> "E-A" == Elaine -HFB- Ashton <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>   E-A> The SunEd catalogue has a number of 2-day courses, the most
>   E-A> expensive I could find was $895 and Sun also offers dicounts for
>   E-A> groups and regular corporate customers. They also offer 3 5-day
>   E-A> Perl courses on a regular basis at the rate of $1900 each.

If Sun's still having retired high-school teachers present the
same weak Perl course written by Ellie-Quigley Perl they had when
I worked as a contract trainer for them (for 8 years), Damian
should be able to command TWICE as much as Sun's price 8-}

>
> i know a sun guy (in colorado) that was reviewing the sun perl class
> notes. he found at least one mistake and it sounded like they were not as
> sharp about it as they could be. sun is not a known perl education house
> but they have clout in the tech market in general. i don't consider what
> they offer as direct competition. 
>
> and their 2 days for $895 vs. damian (an acknowledged excellent teacher
> and expert in this subject) for 2 days @ $999 does not seem out of range
> at all.

Sun's educational quality is actually quite high, especially
for topics they understand (like C and Java, but not shells or
Perl), but this is an apples/oranges comparison, because Sun's
programming classes are all hands on with expensive equipment and
journeyman instructors, and Damian's seminars are lecture only by
a celebrity instructor.  Still, when I produced Damian's classes
here in Seattle last Summer, we charged about $500/day and got
nearly 30 people for his  Adv. OOP class.  I'm a proponent of
10% discounts for early registrants, because the alternative is
generally to get stuck paying a steep conference-room cancellation
charge when you find out after the no-penalty deadline that you
won't have enough students.

I would urge Uri to toughen up the pre-reqs statement to exclude
those who aren't thoroughly familiar with references, map and
grep, and *writing* OO code (as opposed to just using OO modules
in procedural programs).   We had several people in the Seattle
classes who were thrilled with Damian's performance, but later
confided to me that they were got hung-up early on trying to
decipher the (rather dense) code samples, and didn't really
comprehend much that followed.

> > uri > > --
> Uri Guttman  ---------  [email protected]  ----------  http://www.sysarch.com
> SYStems ARCHitecture, Software Engineering, Perl, Internet, UNIX Consulting
> The Perl Books Page  -----------  http://www.sysarch.com/cgi-bin/perl_books
> The Best Search Engine on the Net  ----------  http://www.northernlight.com

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