“XML Web Services for RPG Programmers” – the course

Yep, you read that right. I ventured into uncharted territories writing a training course and loved every minute of it – well, most of it anyway. Writing a training course is like writing 60 articles on the same subject in a fraction of the time.

The training course is titled “XML Web Services for RPG Programmers” and is being published by the Rochester Initiative (a.k.a www.Lab400.com).  My goal for the course was to provide very practical training for RPG developers to quickly and tangibly learn about the XML Web Service technology phenomenon.  I focused on real world best practices that I have encountered over the years with RPG-XML Suite (www.rpg-xml.com) and cause the reader to get their hands dirty (in a good way ;-) by doing labs and exercises.  There’s a lot an RPG programmer should know about XML and Web Services, and a lot of stuff that just doesn’t matter that much – I focused on the former and made sure to offer handy tips throughout the course to save the reader countless hours of head scratching.

You can buy a copy of the training course at both www.lab400.com and www.rpg-xml.com, but if you learn about the course here please buy it from the latter link as that will allow me to have a greater percentage of the sale.  I do realize the training course is more expensive than what one would normally pay for a “book”, but please realize this is the same course work I would take with me to on-site training of which I charge MUCH more for.

You can get a better idea of of what is covered in the course by heading over to www.xml4rpg.com (the site specifically created for this training course) and reviewing the table of contents (or just click here).

History

I started on it in late June of 2007 with a goal to have it completed by Sept 1st.  I *thought* that date might be a possibility based on the fact that I live and breathe the subject every day for a number of years now, and have also written about the subject many times over.  Needless to say I missed that deadline and also the next I set for Oct.  I had to put the course writing more or less on the shelf for a couple months because of the busy traveling/conference/speaking schedule I had (8 travel dates in 7 months from Oct 2007 to May 2008).  Not to mention my wife was pregnant with our fourth child (yeah, I am working on being a better father/husband and the process of writing this course has taught me a lot about that).

Thanks to those that have already purchased the training course and please let me know if you have any questions concerning it.  Like it says in the training course you can email me questions at aaronbartell at mowyourlawn dot com.

To wrap up this post I would like to thank Rochester Initiative for embracing me on this venture and I look forward to writing another piece of work which I have started brainstorming already!  :-)