Stephen Schwartz-Fenwick

Review of 8th light

I just completed the 4-day "Object Oriented Design...

I just completed the 4-day "Object Oriented Design" training with instructors Cyrus Vandrevala and Eric Smith.
o In my opinion, the most useful part of the training for me was Design Patterns and SOLID principles. However, they only covered 8 patterns and that plus the SOLID principles was fit into a couple hours. I felt that there should have been more detail provided on this -- I didn't feel like the time allotted was sufficient. You can find YouTube videos (see Christopher Okhravi for example) where ~30-60 minutes is devoted to each pattern.
o Exercises (termed "code retreats", which took up approximately 2 of the 4 days) were mostly free-format work on several "from scratch" projects (Coffee machine, Payroll system, Mastermind game, Conway's Game of Life). I had hoped that exercises would target specifically what we learned in the slides they did not. (Of course you could use what you learned if you had arrived at that answer yourself.)
o While projects were in the programming language of our choice, instruction by the teachers was language-agnostic and mostly in UML. I find UML difficult to translate into C++, and I would have liked to see corresponding examples in C++ (though I do recognize this isn't the language that everyone in the class is using).
o Approximately one day was devoted to software process-oriented themes such as packaging objects, pair programming, test-driven development, and mocking objects. This is useful information, however only if your organization subscribes to it.
o A few other annoyances:
There was no course outline distributed we didn t know where the course was going at times
Exercises were only displayed on the projector (no handouts) which made it necessary for us to waste our time copying things down from the projector
No evaluation was solicited at the end of the course (hence why I am writing this review)