Sections:

Learn Online Free Computer Courses

RadioShack offering classes online

DALLAS � RadioShack Corp. is turning to online classes to help consumers navigate the confusing world of technology.

Consumers can learn how to edit digital photos, choose and set up high-definition televisions, buy a new computer and explore satellite radio. The free classes announced Wednesday will have staggered start dates beginning this month and November.

Participants who sign up online can take the courses at their own pace but it shouldn't take more than a month to complete. The classes will be moderated by instructors with experience in the specific topics, company officials said.

The hope, of course, is that shoppers will use their newfound wisdom to buy products from RadioShack.

"We need to be out there giving advice and building loyalty and trust in the RadioShack brand," said Bob Kilinski, the company's vice president of marketing.

Help for confused consumers

RadioShack Corp. is turning to online classes to help consumers navigate the confusing world of technology.

Consumers can learn how to edit digital photos, choose and set up high-definition televisions, buy a new computer and explore satellite radio. The free classes will have staggered start dates beginning this month and November.

Participants who sign up online can take courses at their own pace, but it shouldn't take more than a month to complete. The classes will be moderated by instructors with experience in the specific topics, company officials said.

The hope, of course, is that shoppers will use their newfound wisdom to buy Radio Shack products.

"We need to be out there giving advice and building loyalty and trust in the RadioShack brand," said Bob Kilinski, the company's vice president of marketing.

July 23rd, 2008 02:30 PM

Practical Django Projects

Chromodromic writes "Apress's newest Django offering, Practical Django Projects by James Bennett, weighs in lightly at 224 pages of actual tutorial content, but trust me, they're dense pages. Filled with pragmatic examples which directly address the kinds of development issues you will encounter when first starting out with Django, this book makes an important addition to the aspiring Django developer's reference shelf. In particular, the book's emphasis on demonstrating best practices while building complete projects does an excellent job of accelerating an understanding of Django's most powerful features — in a realistic, pragmatic setting — and which a developer will be able to leverage in very short order." Read below for the rest of Greg's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 23rd, 2008 09:00 AM

Slimmed Down MySQL Offshoot Drizzle is Built For the Web

Incon writes "Builder AU reports that Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL. Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types."