GBdirect's Unix Training Courses: An Overview

Nearly a Quarter of a Century of Unix Experience

GBdirect has been involved with Unix training from its very inception. The company's Managing Director (Mike Banahan) has been introducing students to Unix since the mid 1970s. Along the way he built the UK's principal Unix consultancy (The Instruction Set) and played a significant role in developing the standards and applications which made this operating system the workhorse of corporate computing.

Today, not only are all of our technical staff long term Unix users but almost all of our office work is also done on the platform (via Linux, a free implementation of the Unix/POSIX standards).

We know of few other Unix trainers who can bring this depth of practical experience to their course designs or delivery.

Please see the menu to the left for details of the Unix courses we currently have on offer.

Implementing Unix Open Standards

The commercial success of Unix was built on its implementation of open standards, i.e. standards which ensured corporate data remained in the hands of its owners not in the hands of the companies whose hardware/software stored it.

Today GNU/Linux is, for all practical purposes, the most POSIX compliant operating system available and the reference platform for Unix development. Since we are committed to teaching vendor-neutral Unix fundamentals, it has become the base for our generic Unix training.

Linux is yet to supplant commercial implementations of Unix (e.g. Solaris, AIX, Tru64 and HP-UX) at the `big iron' end of the market, but we believe its growth and maturation parallels that of BSD Unix, i.e. a pattern of rapid evolution based on the open exchange of source code and on rigourous peer review from quality programmers unconstrained by vendor lock-in.

Just as the free availability and technical advantages of BSD forced proprietary Unix vendors to innovate and retain open standards in the 1980s, so it is with Linux today (most ground-breaking innovation now happens first on Linux, e.g. drag and drop desktops, Corba network apps, MS Windows compatibility, wireless, embedded devices, IA64 support, etc, etc.). Moreover, Linux leads the Unix charge into the small server market where the low up-front cost and hidden follow-on costs of Microsoft-style solutions have challenged proprietary vendors.

Learn the Fundamentals Before the Extensions Not Vice Versa

Contrary to press opinion, all Unix variations are fundamentally alike. Some may have evolved less than others and some have specialised extensions (managing proprietary hardware, middleware, etc) but they remain pretty much the same under the hood.

We teach the fundamentals before the specifics because that is the only thing which makes sense to those who buy our training; why would companies pay for staff to learn only one version of one of the operating systems they run?

Companies who want to optimise their use of proprietary Unix systems are often best advised to ensure they have the fundamentals right first. Once users, programmers and administrators begin to work in "the Unix way", specialist extensions can be acquired with relative ease.

If you do need to train staff in the use of proprietary extensions, our consultants' experience with Solaris, AIX, and the rest means we can always offer you a bespoke (but expensive) solution to the problem. Why not give them a call?

Unix public courses schedule