TLCC really includes a lot of detail about things that might normally take you a while to find out about on your own. For instance, they provide a warning on the HTTP process which lets you know that if you have the HTTP process (Web Preview) running, someone else in your organization who knows the address of your machine can browse your databases -- provided the Anonymous or Default access allows them to. This is an extremely important thing to know that I have yet to read somewhere else.

The section describing how you preview something on the Web is worth its weight in gold. It helped me to set up the preview feature properly through a firewall for both the Domino browser and Internet Explorer.

Overcome preconceptions about online learning
One of the things that I've had to overcome is my preconceived notion that online courses are nothing more than books on hypertext steroids and that the learning experience is usually somewhat dull. This course has helped me to see otherwise. It helped to guide me and to get me to guide myself around the new R5 Client and Designer in a more thorough manner than I would have by myself and maybe in a more thorough manner than I would have in an in-person class. Everything seems really familiar to me now since I learned how to do it on my own computer.

In a way, the experience I've had with the R5 Application Development Update class from TLCC has been better than many classroom experiences I've had and is, therefore, more likely to have a more lasting impression on my long-term memory. What you learn to do when taking the class is to configure R5 to work correctly with the exercises, and when you do that, you are really laying the groundwork for when you actually start managing and developing databases using R5.

This course is highly interactive, and includes many exercises interspersed among the static text. You'll actually get your hands dirty working with some of the nuts and bolts of R5. Even some of the simpler pages are interactive, as Figure C shows. Probably best of all, you have all of your sample work with you when you eventually start to develop with R5 in earnest.

FIGURE C


This screen shot of the Domino Designer is actually composed of clickable hotspots that provide more information on each area of the screen. Roll over picture for a larger image.

A (class)room with a great view
The physical layout of the material is actually very well done. I want to point out some of its strengths:

• Screen shots are crisp and clear and even have shadowing which makes them look very professional;

• The screen shots really flow with the text of the lessons. Instead of having large, chunky screen shots they have screen shots of just the section of the screen that is relevant to the lesson, such as the bookmark bar for instance. This makes for both a very visually appealing style as well as for easy learning since what they are talking about is just a quick glance to the side of the screen away;