January 19, 2012 Update: I want to apologize for how long it is taking to get GeekCap up and running. The good news is that I am just days away from launching it. The big lesson that I learned while building the site was that the CMS took A LOT of work - the site itself is simple compared to building the CMS and the tooling for manipulating the data in the CMS. But now that the CMS is complete I'm testing the site in different browsers (thank you IE8 for not cooperating, although after considerable effort, IE8 is now working properly) and putting the finishing touche on it. So stay tuned and check back frequently, we're almost there!
Welcome to the preview release of GeekCap! We'll be going live on January 25, 2012, but let me tell you a little about what we're going to be doing. This page is used for announcements (like this) and will show you what is new. GeekCap is arranged into "Campuses", or communities if you like, each about a specific topic. Each campus presents a collection of three resources for its topic area:
- Articles: articles educate you about some topic. Articles may be hosted here at GeekCap or might be links to other sites (I have over 400 articles up on InformIT.com and I'll point you to them rather than rewrite them!)
- Courses: courses are comprised of online classes, usually 15-30 minutes in length. Each class is targeted at a specific subject and aims to teach you that subject quickly and concisely. The standard format is an MP4 video file that contains a slide presentation as well as examples and tours that are recorded via screen sharing, all narriated by one of our instructors. Some classes are free and some cost "education units", but that's not live yet, so we'll get into that later. You can rest assured though, the purpose of our online classes it to educate you quickly and affordably, so don't expect to pay much more for a class than you would for a specialty cup of coffee at your favorite coffee house! You are free to pick and choose the individual classes that you want to take - the concept of a "course" is just a categorical grouping for you.
- Learning Tracks: if there is a topic that you're interested in learning, then these learning tracks are designed to help you do so. The purpose of a learning track is to take a subject, like Spring RESTful Web Services, and compile a collection of articles, books, web resouces, classes, and so forth, into a plan that you can follow to learn that topic. The content may be hosted here on GeekCap, but may also be found elsewhere on the Internet. As an example, a learning track might tell you to first read three specific articles (which might be located on different web sites) to get a high-level understanding of the topic, then to start reading through a specific book or a set of chapters in one or more books to learn the details about the topic, and finally to review a few sample applications or components found on the Internet to solidify your understanding. In short, learning tracks provide a guided plan to help you learn one of dozens of topics.
Please come back on January 1st and join me for the pilot release of GeekCap, which will include the launch of the Java campus (the "Java" link above will be live.) I welcome your feedback at steve@geekcap.com.
Cheers,
Steven Haines