Being able to drive a car is a far more useful skill for me (personally) than being able to service that same car would be. And having the life skills to live in a house is far more of a mainstream thing than being able to actually build that house. But that doesn't mean that there's no call for people with the skills of servicing cars, that all house builders have unemployable skills - it means that they are more niche roles and we don't need to train too many people for those jobs. The same thing applies in the IT world.

A question from my mailbox: "Why do we teach computer graphic theory in university instead of graphic software such as Photoshop?"

My answer: "Because we need a pool of people who are skilled at writing and maintaining firmware and software for the graphics boards that we all have in our PCs". And I can add that it's a far more skilled role to be able to design, write, implement and maintain such drivers than it is to be able to pull up a picture in Photoshop and lighten / darken / sharpen it. So it's only natural for the use of computer software to be taught at a younger age when more people are still in education, and to be taught in vocational colleges, but then for the niche topics such as the practical application of Bresenham's algorithm to be taught on specialised further educational courses.

"As an extra, I will add that for a really heavy user of a technology, it can be useful having some background / insite into the next layer. I happen to do / have done a lot of work with Computer Graphics, and my knowledge of polygon fill techniques, clipping, perspective display, etc is a help when working with user packages, just like my knowledge of how compilers work is so helpful when I'm training on any one of what is a substantial range of languages that we cover. On that same basis, it's good for a professional driver to have some idea of how the car he's in is serviced, and for all of us to have an idea of how our home was constructed and is maintained.

At Well House Consultants, we specialise in computing niches like the examples I've given above. Many people use computer software, but only a very few need to learn ruby to use testing and validation tools to check it out. Most of us order online, but only a small proportion need to learn to program in PHP to actually write the software for such an ordering system. It's because we're so specialised - so niche - that we have our own hotel for course delegates and in many other ways a very different model indeed to a company who trains in the use of Photoshop, Excel, Sage ...
(written 2010-02-13, updated 2010-03-05)

 Q913 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Computer Graphics Principles
  [2245] Client side (Applet) and Server side (Servlet) Graphics in Java - (2009-06-17)
  [2758] But what will you DO with all those pictures? - (2010-05-09)
  [2992] Matplotlib - graphing in Python - teaching examples - (2010-10-10)
  [3049] Computer Graphics is fun - even if Java Applets are Old Hat - (2010-11-13)
  [3148] OpenGL / C / C++ - an example to get you started - (2011-01-26)
  [3211] Computer Graphics in PHP - World (incoming data) to Pixel (screen) conversion - (2011-03-24)
  [3261] Scalable Vector Graphics - easy, low bandwidth, high resolution, dynamic. - (2011-04-23)
  [3262] Some SVG Elements, pixel and percent positioning - (2011-04-24)

G310 - Well House Consultants - A better class of course
  [211] Look after your staff and they'll look after you. AOL. - (2005-02-12)
  [215] Open Source becomes mainstream - (2005-02-14)
  [219] Some unusual features - (2005-02-18)
  [224] YOUR application and YOUR data - (2005-02-22)
  [230] Course sizes - beware of marketing statistics - (2005-02-27)
  [292] Elegant languages - Perl, PHP, Python - (2005-04-26)
  [350] Want to be one better - (2005-06-17)
  [371] The training team that's looking out for you - (2005-07-07)
  [394] A year on - should we offer certified PHP courses - (2005-07-28)
  [497] I have a river to cross - (2005-11-16)
  [554] What backup is adequate? - (2006-01-04)
  [559] ''I don't know'' is sometimes a good answer - (2006-01-09)
  [577] Learning to program in Perl or PHP - (2006-01-26)
  [579] Short Linux and Perl courses for small groups - (2006-01-27)
  [646] PHP - London course, Melksham Course, Evening course - (2006-03-14)
  [726] In praise of training course delegates. - (2006-05-20)
  [1035] Longer hours and better value courses - (2007-01-15)
  [1453] What makes our courses special? - (2007-12-02)
  [1488] New trainee laptop fleet for our Open Source courses - (2007-12-30)
  [1576] Making PHP and MySQL training relevant to the course delegates - (2008-03-15)
  [1645] Seeing how others do it - PHP training - (2008-05-17)
  [1933] Learning to Program in C - (2008-12-10)
  [2010] How long should a training module be? - (2009-01-27)
  [2049] Why Choose Well House Consultants for your course? - (2009-02-20)
  [2074] Weekday or Weekend PHP, Python and Perl classes? - (2009-03-10)
  [2084] Books and distance learning from Well House Consultants? - (2009-03-15)
  [2109] Why most training fails ... - (2009-03-30)
  [2187] Are we IITT (Institute of IT Training) members? - (2009-05-17)
  [2762] Well House - Mission and Policy summaries - (2010-05-13)
  [3001] How will we present courses over the coming years? - (2010-10-17)
  [3271] The importance of feedback - (2011-04-30)
  [3385] Do university courses teach the right things for life at work later on? - (2011-08-10)
  [3419] Data that we use during our training courses, and other training resources - (2011-09-04)
  [3587] C++ Courses - do I get official certification at the end of my Well House course? - (2012-01-20)
  [4280] Making use of huge data, object orientation, unit testing and frameworks - (2014-06-07)
  [4558] Well House Consultants - Python courses / what's special. - (2015-10-28)
  [4583] Back in the saddle again - excellent open source course from Well House Consultants - (2015-11-26)

Back to Shipping a test harness with your class in PHP

Previous and next or Horse's mouth home

Forward to London to and from Melksham by public transport

Courses - Melksham and elsewhere - until the end of April
Linux - useful tips including history and file name completion
A PHP example that lets your users edit content without HTML knowledge
London to and from Melksham by public transport
Why do I teach niche skills rather than mainstream?
Shipping a test harness with your class in PHP
How to show a large result set page by page in PHP
Static variables and ampersands in PHP
Curly braces within double quoted strings in PHP
An example of an injection attack using Javascript