Our Training Center

Our training centre is situated in a historic (listed) Georgian building on the outskirts of Melksham, in an area known as "The Spa". Spring waters are found here, and in 1813 a Spa house, a ballroom, and three lodging houses were built to encourage visitors here to partake of the waters. Although the springs have long since closed, the lodging houses remain and our training centre is located in one of them. You'll be trained in beautiful quiet historic surroundings, but we're "bang up to date" with the facilities we offer!

Equipment
We have a wide range of equipment ... you'll find computers by Sun, HP, Compaq, Mac, Toshiba and others, and operating systems from MacOS through to Solaris, and Linux to Windows. Most of our servers run Linux; large memory and disc specs allow us to count our capacity in Terabytes, and we have local mirror copies of such databases as the entire human Geonome, and the Open Directory source listing some 3 million web sites. Each trainee has use of a trainee workstation for the duration of the course. The trainee workstations are all networked laptops (we provide mice as we know that some of you don't like tracker pads!) giving you fast internal and external access, but also not blocking your view of the trainer and board during class.

Connectivity
All trainee workstations have 100 Megabit connections to our local area network, and have access to our broadband connection to the Internet. We have built in redundancy - backup ISDN lines, generator, etc.

Trainees who bring their own laptops may connect via our links - either using a conventional network connection (10 or 100 base T) via Cat5 cable, or by wireless networking (IEEE 802.11b). We'll provide you with setup details once you're here so that you can make full use of our facilities. We also have an analogue telephone line available if you need to dial in direct from your own laptop for any reason.

Messages for trainees may be left with our course administrator (01225 708225) and will normally be passed on during breaks in training. Faxes for trainees may be sent to 01225 707126. Most trainees make outgoing calls from their mobile phones these days, but if you prefer you're welcome to make use of our land lines. Our administrator can also send faxes for you if necessary.

Trainer
All our courses are given by a professional staff trainer, who still undertakes a proportion of "real life programming" to ensure that he's up to date and hasn't gone rusty. The trainer is also the author of the course and notes that's he's presenting - you'll find his subject knowlegde a refreshing change if you're a regular course-goer.

Courses
You can learn PHP, Perl, Java, Ruby, Tcl/Tk and MySQL on public courses at our training centre and we offer several different courses in the more popular subjects.

Courses last from 1 to 5 days, and we take a maximum of 8 bookings per course. We confirm bookings immediatley we receive your purchase order, and we never cancel courses with confirmed bookings. Very occasionally, this guarantee means that we run a course at a loss, but our customers really appreciate the certainty we offer.

If you have a group of people who all require the same training course at the same time, please let us know; for groups of 4 or more, it'll cost you less for us to run a private course for you - and private courses can be tailored to meet you exact needs, and run at your offices too.

Notes
Each trainee receives a full set of training notes for the subject covered, including all the standard examples used on the course with detailed annotation. Typically, our bound A4 note sets comprise about 60 pages per day. We print notes in-house, and update regularly - don't be suprised is the print date on your notes is just a couple of days before the course started.

Catering
Teas, coffees, cold drinks and snacks are always available and free. Lunch is also included in the course price. On a typical course, we'll eat at a local pub on the first day, then cater at the training centre for the rest of the course (we find that our trainees are too keen to take a long lunch break!). We take a vote of the course attendees, and provide lunch based on that vote ... options range from Indian and Chinese food, through MacDonald's and Pizza to cold buffet and sandwiches.

If you're vegetarian, vegan, or have a special dietary requirement (e.g. a nut allergy), please let us know ahead of time so that we can ensure that we have suitable food available on the first day.

Library
Our library is available for trainees reference throughout the course; it provides you with a chance to choose which of some 300 books on the subjects that we teach is most relevant to you before you order your own copy. Students are welcome to borrow books overnight, and also to contact us after their course if they want to come back and make further use of the library.

Access
We're just off the main A365 (Melksham to Devizes) road, and have plenty of parking available in our own grounds ... although many visitors who stay at local hotels and B&Bs enjoy the short walk in each day. Although formal courses start at 9 am (9:45 on the first day) and finish at 5 pm (4:45 on the last day), you're welcome to arrive early and leave late; the trainee workstation that you're using during the course has unrestricted broadband access to the Internet and many trainees choose to keep up to date with their emails, or simply surf, long after 5 .... coffee and tea are always on tap, and the place turns into a regular "Internet Cafe"!

There's a flight of steps up to our main entrance and training room, and listed building regulations make it unlikely that we would get permission to install a ramp. Please let us know at the time of booking if you can't manage stairs, as we can usually run the course in an alternative room with flat access. The alternative room has the full facilities described above, and bathroom, coffee, lunch etc are all also available on the flat.