At Well House Consultants, we specialise in teach you how to write and maintain good computer programs. By which we mean we'll teach you programming so that your code is well thought out, reliable, efficient for your user, straightforward to modify if requirements change with time. You'll learn how to write code that is properly structured and documented so that your colleagues can help on a larger project, and can reuse common elements of your code in their programs too.

Whether or not you've written programs before, we have the course for you - we offer different training paths for beginners (to programming) and for convertors (who have programmed before, but in other languages).

We run open courses (sometimes known as public courses) at our Melksham, Wiltshire, England training centre. These are courses onto which anyone can book - either through their company, or directly. Depending on the subject you choose, and whether you choose the beginner or the convertor stream, you'll be looking at a course that runs for anything from 2 days up to a week, studying in a small group (maximum 8 delegates) for about 8 hours a day, but with the ability to carry on with practical exercises and to chat with the tutor for further guidance that's specific to your own requirements prior to the classes starting for the day, and on into the evening.

Delegates come from far and wide for our courses - especially in the more niche subjects - and so we offer hotel quality accommodation at our training centre. Staying with us is optional - it's good value and very convenient, but if you live nearby or have friends and family in our area, or if your company requires you to use a particular chain, that's good with us.


C and C++. The C and C++ languages are the foundation stones of modern computing. C has a wide variety of uses including operating systems, device drivers, scientific calculation, and other intensive computing applications where runtime performance is paramount. C++ adds the Object Oriented paradigm on top of C - making for an enormously powerful language for larger and team coded tasks, and suites of programs. [course options]

PHP. If you're writing or working with a web application, it's most likely to be written in PHP or Java. PHP is a language that's excellent for all but the largest of applications, and it's particularly well suited for sites where you'll be counting your traffic in visits per minute, rather than visits per second. With PHP, good design and coding is even more important than with other languages, and on all of our courses we 'major' on topics such as keeping the graphic design and the program logic in separate areas, and on issues such as sessions, security and usability, as well as the fundamentals of the PHP language. [course options]

Java. If your web site is a busy one - with hundreds of visits per minute ... or if you're running a single application web site ... or if you're programming anything from mobile devices to banking systems and backends, Java may be your choice. With such a wide range of uses, there are a wide range of Java-linked technologies you may wish to learn. Our public courses cover the fundamentals of Java, and its use on the web server. [course options]

Python. Python is an object oriented scripting language. That means that you can write code and run it straight away, without any need to go through extra steps to turn your code into a runnable program, and that you can structure you code to make it easy to share common parts between programs, baseing similar elements on the same underlying elements.[course options]

Perl. If you need to write a handful of lines of code to manipulate some data, to extract some key records from an ocean of information, or to bolt together a series of utilities and other programs into an automated task, nothing can beat Perl - the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Perl is not the easiest language to learn; there are so many ways of doing the same thing that it can be confusing, but if you take time to learn it, and to learn how to write code that you'll be able to reuse too, you'll be amply rewarded. [course options]

Ruby. Ruby is the programming language behind "Ruby on Rails" or RoR - a web framework that lets your write your web code for sustainable productivity. Ruby's also used in web site testing environments such as Selenium and Watir, and in a wide variety of other tasks - it's an excellent language, taking the best characteristics of both Perl and Python into a single well-structured whole. [course options]

Tcl. Tcl, Tcl/Tk, Expect and Wish are commonly embedded within major applications written in C and / or C++, and allow the programmer of those major applications to provide a programming (scripting) interface for his user, so that users can add in tailored code quickly, easily, and in a controlled manner. Application areas are as wide as control of lathes and milling machines, testing railway signalling systems, integrated circuit design and ir traffic control. Tcl, the Tk extension (to add a graphic user interface) and Expect (to add the automation of keyboard based processes) are excellent tools in their own right too. [course options]

Lua. You'll find Lua embedded within a number of systems - ranging from computer games (where you can use it to change the characteristics of your players, build macros, and choreograph scenarios) through to virus scanners! The language itself has a tiny footprint, making it ideal for embedding. And it has a very flexible open source license, making it an excellent candidate to include within a commercial product without licensing and legal ramifications. [course options]

We also offer courses on the Linux operating system, on the MySQL relational database and on the Apache Tomcat and httpd servers.

If you have several delegates who require the same course at the same time, we can offer a small price reduction for the second and subsequent delegates. And as the group size grows, we can run an extra private course for you - tailored to meet your organisation's needs.


We've provided answers to a lot of the more frequently asked questions on this site. If you're looking to choose which course within a particular subject area, follow the links alongside that subject and you'll be taken to a comparison of the course, from where you can look at the contents, prerequisites and aims in detail.

There's a page that tells you more about the training centre and facilities [here], and a page that tells you about onsite courses (at your own offices) [here].

There is plenty of other information too ... in fact, so much that it can be a bit overwhelming - take a look around, and call or email if you would like help.

You can book public courses online via our secure server [here] ... but we really want you to be certain you're booking the right course - so call us on 01225 708225, or email info@wellho.net if you've any doubt, or prefer the more personal approach.