Re: [SAGE] Where to start?

[Anthony Howe <achowe@snert.com>]

>>Teach the philosophy of UNIX.

> A helpful refresher, and source of insight for the instructor might be the book
>     The Unix Philosophy
>     Mike Gancarz
> I don't know if this would be of any help to the students or not.

The problem with books are that my audience are french and reading 
in english is an effort (I know cause I hate reading in french) 
and anything more than a few pages and they'll loose interest.

> Also helpful for the instructor to remind of explicit ideas in Unix
> are the ideas embedded in
>      Software Tools
>      Kernighan and Plauger

I have this book and a few others.  This is of interest to 
programmers than sys.admins.  My audience has little or no 
interest in programming beyond ASP and PHP for web sites.  I 
seriously doubt they'll ever write a Ruby or Perl script, even 
though they've seen what I can do with them when they bring me a 
problem.

What I'm looking for are more concret topics that would interest 
to busy Windows sys.admins. trying to learn new skills or transfer 
existing skills to a new problem space.  Essentially I have to be 
able to introduce or cover topics and I suppose build a "cookbook" 
  (as someone suggested) and put many of the notes online with my 
PHP Q&A. Later I suspect I'll have to come back and beat them over 
the head again to point out things they've overlooked or update 
the "cookbook".

My problem is I'm just not sure where to start. Several of you 
have all suggested good ideas from teaching technique to reference 
material, but if its not already in french, then I have to 
summarise it for them.

Right now they want to know what they need to know to keep the 
machines running.  Once they're comfortable with that they might 
be more inclined to branch out.

-- 
Anthony C Howe                            +33 6 11 89 73 78
http://www.snert.com/     ICQ: 7116561      AIM: Sir Wumpus
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