Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Adobe MAX 2008 AIR Boot Camp Course Online

James Ward and I gave a 3.5 hour mega lab at Adobe MAX 2008 which was attended by 250 people (sold out). The course is designed so that anyone can take it at as a self-paced tutorial. Here is a shot of about 25% of the room.



After the success of the course, we decided to upload all the materials so others could take this and teach. It contains some great examples from James' book as well as 12 completed projects. These demonstrate the main aspects of AIR that distinguish it from Flex and Flash.

While presenting this at MAX, there were some minor glitches and that is why we are posting this publicly. One glitch was that the webservicex.com site was not working well (an external site required for the web services module). This was obviously well beyond our abilities to control so we had to do the best we could at the time. If you want to see how the web services introspection wizard works, please watch the Code and Tunes segment of Duane's World Episode 1. I have tested it now and it seems to be working okay. This could have been a bandwidth issue with 250 people connected to the Internet at the same time.

The second glitch was very minor. We had a few people who complained and said "We never got a chance to complete all the labs [modules] of the course". This was by design; James and I always include more materials than we know can be covered in the time allowed. This is done to allow attendees to work through the rest of the course at their own leisure. The course is set up so anyone can take it and we wanted to have more than enough materials to be somewhat flexible should the consensus in the room be to explore one particular aspect of AIR in more detail.

The course is being given out in hopes that others will take it and teach it at their companies or to user groups. You may download the AIR Tutorial from here: The course is laid out as follows:

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|- - AIR-Boot-Camp_DNICKULL-FINAL.* - PDF and PPT versions of slides
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|-- * AIRBootCampHandouts - what you give out to attendees if you teach it
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|--AttendeeProjects - these are the starter projects for the students
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|--CompletedProjects - the solutions for each of the 12 labs

* Use the handout as the Teachers Guide - a special guide for those who wish to teach this class.

Good luck - please let us know if this works for you. If you want to introduce AIR to your co-workers, we encourage you to take these materials and use them as you wish. We did this for you and put a lot of effort into this.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for making this available.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds interesting. Downloading to give it a whirl now...

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  3. You and James Ward gave a 3.5 hour mega lab at Adobe MAX 2008 and 250 people learning together! Pretty amazing, I remember my university days :) But I must admit that you two guys (Duane and James) are way cooler than my teachers!

    Thanks,
    Sujan
    my site

    ReplyDelete
  4. Brilliant idea for a blog and love reading it!
    I would love to attend a MAX Boot camp one day. Looks crowded though :)

    ReplyDelete

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