List of Training Courses Provided

In the past, The Refactory, Inc. have assisted many organizations with training. Throughout that time we have developed core courses that we feel best exemplify important knowledge needed during the software development process.  Our available courses are listed below, but remember, no topic is without lesson, so feel free to contact us with a course suggestion that you and your company would like to be implemented.  We'll tailor fit our training to meet your needs.  We will provide our courses both on and off site.  Framework Training This tutorial teaches how to design frameworks. It describes what they are, describes an example-driven iterative development process for designing them, and describes a set of object-oriented design patterns and a set of transformations for applying the design patterns. The design patterns and the set of transformations (refactorings) are useful for making any object-oriented design more flexible and reusable, but they are essential in framework design. The tutorial also describes how to document a framework, and it covers a little bit of topics like testing, scheduling. and performance tuning. [view full description] Pattern Training This course will teach you what patterns are and how to use them to design flexible, reusable object-oriented software. It examines the most important patterns in depth, and makes sure you see all of them at least once. It will also cover a few patterns not in Design Patterns, such as Tpe Object and Properties and some of Kent Beck's coding patterns. The course has lots of examples, and we have taught it for programmers in C++, Java, and Smalltalk. Once the class is over, you should understand design patterns, know where they fit in the software development process, and be able to leverage them to solve design problems efficiently. [view full description] Refactoring Training This tutorial will teach attendees how to recognize “code” smells”, or signs that code needs to be refactored.  It takes you through Martin Fowler’s Refactoring book, teaching you the correct discipline for refactoring your code.  Java code examples will be used to illustrate how and when to refactor.  Other languages such as Smalltalk and C++ can be used if this is what the majority of the attendees use as the primary language for their development.  The class will examine how to apply object-oriented design patterns to guide your refactoring decisions. [view full description] Smalltalk Training The purpose of this course is to learn to think in objects, to learn how to design flexible, reusable, maintainable object-oriented systems in Smalltalk You will acquire skills in developing applications in the Smalltalk language.  Smalltalk is a powerful system, and it takes time to learn it. One difference between the way we teach and the way other people teach is that we do not believe in short one-week courses. A short course on Smalltalk only introduces you to it; it cannot make you useful in it. We believe that a good course needs to be at least a couple of weeks long. This with immediately using what you have learned on a small project, with some mentoring, is what makes the difference in people being productive in the language and those that are not.  That is why we offer the class in two increments; an introductory course (which this proposal addresses) and an advanced course (highly recommended). [view full description] Smalltalk Advanced Training This advanced course will build on your basics of objects and Smalltalk to become more of an expert in the Smalltalk language and become more comfortable using the Smalltalk library (see the benefits section above).  This advance course will show how VisualAge is built on the Smalltalk basics and teach students how to be comfortable in the VisualAge development environment.  An emphasis will be put on how to organize applications and how to apply Smalltalk’s Best Practices at outlined in Kent Beck’s book.  Students will have hands on experience working with some sample exercises that will have them writing more involved sets of Smalltalk classes that will build up to developing simple Smalltalk applications.   This class will also focus on how to build applications with the pre-existing components and frameworks supplied in IBM’s VisualAge architecture. [view full description] Testing Training This two-day tutorial will teach attendees how to design and build test suites that give enduring confidence in their code.  The course will consist of a mixture of lectures, reading groups, dialogs, and labs.  The attendees will read testing materials, discuss the details of the techniques, and apply them in a group setting (preferably to code they are currently working on). [view full description]