Education

Java training course starting next Monday 20 April

14 April 2009 By Avinash Meetoo 13 Comments

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A few weeks ago, I blogged about the imminent start of our MQA-approved Object-Oriented Programming in Java course next Monday 20 April. The topics which are going to be covered in depth are:

Object-oriented analysis, design and programming
The Java programming language
The Java class library including Collections and Input/Output
Generics and Multithreading
Unit testing (including the use of JUnit and mock objects)

Notice that the focus is both on object-orientation as well as Java. In my opinion, someone who aspire to eventually master enterprise technologies like Struts, Spring and Hibernate needs to have both skills.

Designing object-oriented software is hard. Expert designers know not to do is solve every problem from first principles. They reuse solutions that have worked before. That is why I am putting so much emphasis on sound object-oriented design principles (including the use of design patterns.)

In the coming weeks, Knowledge Seven Ltd will launch two further Java courses which will build upon this foundation Object-Oriented Programming in Java course:

Web Application Development in Java with a focus on presentation layer technologies such as Servlets, Struts 2 and possibly innovative frameworks such as Wicket. The objective is to allow the trainee to build a complete 2-tier web application using JDBC for persistence.
Entreprise Java with Spring and Hibernate with a focus on using Spring and Hibernate to build a complete 3-tier enterprise application. The trainee will use the facilities found in Spring (including dependency injection and AOP) to build the domain logic layer of the application. He/she will also use the object-relational mapping facilities of Hibernate for data persistence.

These two courses are intensive and the trainee(s) will have to possess a good mastery of object-orientation and Java in order to follow them satisfactorily (for example, by following this Object-Oriented Programming in Java course.) In fact, I have purposely designed the three courses to be complementary.

There are still seats left and it would be a pleasure for us to train you or people from your company. Do not hesitate to contact us!

Is Mauritius like Sweden or Bangladesh?

9 April 2009 By Avinash Meetoo 46 Comments

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While browsing today, I came up across this Gallup survey done in February on the importance of religion in different countries all over the world:

The countries where people give a lot of importance to religion are: Egypt, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Congo, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Senegal, Djibouti, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. Notice that most of them are countries where a lot of people are poor (and some people are extremely rich.)

Countries where people generally do not give a lot of importance to religion are: Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, Hong Kong, Japan, France, Mongolia, Belarus.

Apart from Mongolia (?!?), these countries can be separated into two groups:

ex-USSR countries like Estonia, the Czech Republic, Azerbaijan and Belarus where religion was suppressed by the state and
countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Hong Kong, Japan and France.

Now, I don’t want to jump to conclusions but it seems to me thatÂ Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Hong Kong, Japan and France are countries which are rich, fairly democratic and which have a good (and, for some of them, excellent) education system. Does this imply that educated people tend to give less importance to religion? And, more interestingly, does this mean that atheists (those without a belief in any God) generally have a high level of education? Yes, it would seem.

And what about Mauritius? People give a lot of importance to religion in our country (especially if they need to be elected and/or they have problems.) And the Minister of Education said our education system has failed to deliver. Is there a correlation between the two?

By the way, I’m an atheist.

Teaching to university students again (on a part-time basis)

18 March 2009 By Avinash Meetoo 12 Comments

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At 16:30 today, I’ll start teaching Enterprise Application Development to MSc Advanced Computing students of the CDAC School of Advanced Computing, a joint venture between the University of Mauritius and the Center for Development of Advanced Computing in India.

Of course, I’ll only do that on a part-time basis, once per week (Wednesday from 16:30 – 19:30) for the next 15 weeks. I’m still the Managing-Director of Knowledge Seven Ltd :-)

I was a little bit unwilling to take up that module initially, so soon after leaving the University of Mauritius and still in the process of launching my own company. In the end, I accepted because (i) I was going to be paid for that (ha!), (ii) I had developed the outline for the Enterprise Application Development module when I was at the University with the view to teach it one day and (iii) I love teaching.

Argh! One hour left! Are my slides ready? And my rotin bazaar?