Langr Software Solutions

Training

Langr Software Solutions offers a variety of courses geared toward improving the capabilities of your development team. The courses are anything but "by-the-book" rehashes of readily-available material. Instead, courses are intense but fun hands-on experiences, where students master the fundamentals, as well as learn to apply what they've learned in order to solve real-world problems.

Pricing / Details

Langr Software Solutions offers very competitive pricing.

The base cost for a course is $400 per student per day, based on a the stated class minimum enrollment, plus applicable instructor travel expenses. Additional students may enroll, up to the class maximum, at $350 per student per day. A 10% discount against the base cost is available for payment in advance. We're willing to make deals on multiple courses and follow-up mentoring/coaching.

Courseware Licensing

We are willing to license much of our courseware for one-time use, multiple use, or unlimited times over the course of a year. Licensed courseware is delivered with:

presentation materials
an instructor's guide, providing a detailed outline, written instructions for demos and exercises, key points, typical questions and appropriate answers
any source code base, complete with build scripts as applicable
email support for the instructor for reasonable inquiries, and four hours of phone support

Please contact us for further details.

Location

Courses may be taught on-site or at a location of your choosing. See Course Requirements below for setup information.

Course Requirements

All courses require a reasonably sized room with comfortable seating, an LCD projector, and at least one whiteboard. Non-development courses (for example, Overview of Extreme Programming (XP) and Agile Object Oriented Design) have no additional requirements.

Developer courses involve hands-on computer interaction. Students generally work in pairs, so the number of machines required is the total number of students divided by two, rounded up (for example, 13 students requires 7 computers).

For hands-on courses, students must be able to freely load software onto the machine, and have full access privileges to create, delete, modify, and execute files. The preferred means of loading software is via USB flash drive. Workstations should be networked to each other. In lieu of flash drives, computers must have a CD-ROM drive available or must be able to access the Internet.

The recommended Windows workstation runs XP or Vista, with at least 150M disk space available, and 1G or more of RAM for XP, 2G for Vista. Machines should be preloaded with software required for the specific course (for example, Java and Eclipse), otherwise students will spend valuable class time installing and configuring software. The instructor will be able to provide you with details on how to preload the machine with required software.

We also do Unix® and Cygwin.

Agile/Extreme Programming Courses

FitNesse Plus: Documenting Requirements in Acceptance Tests (1 day)
Audience: FitNesse developers. Shows you how to build refined acceptance tests in FitNesse.

Optimizing Your Sprint Planning (1 day)
Audience: Scrum masters, Scrum team members. Shows you how to improve your Sprint planning meetings with each new Sprint.

Overview of Extreme Programming (XP) (1 day)
Audience: anyone! Provides a basic understanding of XP and its relation to other agile methods.

Practical Agile (4 days)
Audience: software developers. Provides hands-on experience with actually doing agile software development, using practices primarily from Scrum and XP.

Java Courses

Agile Java: Crafting Code With Test-Driven Development (5 days)
Audience: new programmers. Teaches you how to build professional software using Java and TDD, based on the highly-acclaimed book. Learn to program the right way, the first time!

What's New in Java 5/6 (2 days)
Audience: Java programmers. Walks through the new programming features in J2SE 5/6.

General Developer Courses

Advanced TDD (Java) (1 day)
Audience: programmers. This one-day hands-on course will show you techniques for getting the most value out of doing test-driven development (TDD). Advanced TDD will put your developers on the track to mastery of TDD.

Agile Object-Oriented Design (4 days)
Audience: programmers. Teaches you principles of object-oriented design, using UML as the communication language.

Building Swing GUIs With TDD (2 days)
Audience: programmers. A workshop to teach you how to build Swing user interfaces using test-driven development.

FitNesse Programming Crash Course (1 day)
Audience: programmers. An intense, one-day course to get you immersed in understanding and building FitNesse fixtures.

Professional Software Development (4 days)
Audience: programmers. Teaches you programmer concepts and practices necessary to build professional quality software.

Test-Driven Development and Refactoring (Java) (3 days)
Audience: programmers. Teaches you the agile practices of TDD and refactoring using JUnit. Our most popular course!

Test-Driven Development and Refactoring (C++) (3 days)
Audience: programmers. Teaches you the agile practices of TDD and refactoring in C++, using CppUnit or a comparable tool.

Test-Driven Development and Refactoring (Ruby) (3 days)
Audience: programmers. Teaches you the agile practices of TDD and refactoring in Ruby, using your Ruby unit testing tool of choice.

Custom Courses

We can tailor courses to your specific needs. Please contact us for additional information.

Courseware

Langr Software Solutions licenses a variety of courses geared toward improving the capabilities of your development team.

Creating quality courseware is a significant investment. Some people estimate the cost to produce an effective course at one week per hour of course. That means it takes about a half year to produce a three day course!

We've already done the tough work. For each course, we provide a polished material kit, including detailed course schedule breakdowns and example exercise solutions. We also offer remote walkthroughs of the material at consulting rates.

We offer single-use, sitewide, and resale licenses (with rebranding possible) for our courseware, at competitive pricing. Please contact me for further details.

Quotes

We take pride in our instructors and courses. We refine each course every time it's taught, always looking for better ways to reach each and every last one of our students. Our students universally indicate that they'd recommend our courses to others.

A few typical quotes from our feedback forms:

"I enjoyed the class very much and learned a lot. Jeff did an excellent job and I'd take another class from him." - Neil K.
"The course really tied everything I learned (in bits and pieces) together." - Haiwen Z.
"...This hands-on experience helped us a lot." - Amit S.
"I really enjoyed this course." - Brian C.
"Content was fantastic" - anonymous
"Loved it! I expect this to significantly impact our team and our future sprints." - Robert B.
"Highly recommended" - Jim
"the most valuable training I have attended" - anonymous
"The instructor is well rounded and knows the subject very well. His experience and knowledge of the subject matter helped me to understand not only TDD but also approaches to better software development methods." - anonymous
"A definite leader in the industry. Was able to answer all questions." - Kevin L.
"Knew the material well and really helped to keep it interesting." - Jerry
"Friendly, knows what he is talking about, accepts suggestions readily." - Haseen H.
"This is a really excellent course" - Ajaz R.
"Excellent" - Moussa K.
"I had fun! The course was an excellent review for me, and reinforced what I have previously learned about TDD and refactoring. More importantly, I believe the course has given me the ability to improve my skills greatly." - Emily L.
"Very informative. Learned a lot." - anonymous
"The content was great and easy to follow along with. Instructor was clear with the points and exciting to listen to." - Chris B.