Open Technology Group offers PostGIS & UMN MapServer Training

I picked this up on the PostgreSQL list serve:

Open Technology Group (OTG) is based in Morrisville, NC. They offer lots of classes on open source software (LAMP, Linux, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP, etc.), and they just added one that might be of interest to readers of this blog: Introduction to GIS with PostGIS and MapServer.

The "Introduction to GIS with PostGIS & MapServer" course (3 days) covers the following topics:
GIS Fundamentals/Concepts
Installing PostGIS
PostGIS Data Loads (Shape File Imports)
PostGIS Features
Creating PostGIS Tables & Loading Data
Simple PostGIS Queries (Simple Features for SQL)
Visualizing PostGIS Results
Deploying UMN MapServer
Implementing Interactive Maps

You can get a more complete course description here.

Whenever I give a talk at conferences about open source software, I generally get asked where you go for training. I usually end up counting ceiling tiles.* Now I have an actual answer I can give people: go to OTG.

*Most of that is my general ignorance. I’m sure there are lots of places you can go for training. I just don’t know what they are. I don’t think open source folks go to training classes as much as the proprietary folks. Open source software is written by real world people trying to solve real world problems, and as such it’s generally a lot easier to pick up and run with. So my training is Google.com and, if it’s really hairy stuff, Amazon.com (because throwing books is a lot cheaper than throwing computers). But I’ve learned people learn in different ways. I’m a visual learner. I’m not an auditory learner. Beyond tuning my guitar and holding my sunglasses up, my ears are more or less decorative. For example, when my wife tells me repeatedly to do something, I find myself rarely retaining that information for more than 5 minutes. I don’t think my wife is an auditory learner either, as she doesn’t seem to understand this explanation no matter how many times I tell it to her. Maybe we need to put a white board in the living room so we can draw each other pictures.