XML Tutorials

The 3M tutorial was fine. It was like the HTML one. Seems simple, but boring to look at and the screen is too busy. I went through the XML schema tutorial too. I had to read that one at least three times before I understood it somewhat. It makes sense why one would make a schema.

The UACBT videos were pretty good. The parts where he just did PowerPoint was pretty boring to watch. The parts where he showed how to right XML made a lot of sense. He explained things well and clearly. He really made the difference between and the uses for HTML and XML clear.

HTML Tutorials

I took HTML basics at my job a few years ago and I only ever used them to post in a blog where if you wanted to use HTML, you had to do it yourself with tags. I only ever used it when I wanted to insert links or pictures, so all I ever used were those tags plus paragraph, bold, italics, and break. The w3schools tutorial was easy to use, although it was boring to look at. It was organized well with the list of topics on the side, which made it easy to navigate through and to pick and choose. It was also nice that it gave links to examples and that you could edit them and then see what it would look like with your edits. It was a helpful tutorial over all. I didn't go much into the advanced part. I had enough to try just with tables, lists, and frames and figuring out the attributes for different tags.

I also like the mcli tutorial. It required that you do the exercises along with it, which was helpful because it made me do it. It wasn't organized as well as the w3schools tutorial. Also, it had some things in the advanced section that were in the basic section of the w3schools. Overall, I think it helped me going through the exercises.

Vim Text Editor

I installed the vim text editor tutorial and the installation went fine. I went through the tutorial and I thought that it was ok. It was pretty different from any text editor I have ever used because it is modal. It was weird pressing escape to get back to the normal mode. The directional letters took a little while to get used to, but it was not bad since they are in a line on the keyboard. There were a lot of commands that I like and that seemed to save a lot of time using over other text editors. An example is the d command to delete. It is especially useful being able to add a number to delete several words in a row (d5w) or typing dd to delete a whole line. I also like the replace command (r). I did get confused a little in the substitution section. It's cool that you can also do outside commands within the text editor. At one point accidentally hit v before I got to the part about what v does and had a hard time getting out of it.

Tutorials

The tutorials from UA CBT were fairly easy to understand. I did not get everything that he said, but it will make more sense once I try out the commands he talked about. I liked that the videos weren't too long. Plus, he sounded really nice. I watched these tutorials before reading any of the other print tutorials. I liked how he talked about what was in each directory. I also liked how he explained the way files are displayed and what it means. I also liked the find and grep utilities. Those were interesting. I didn't really understand the linking part.

The Learning the Shell lessons were easy to understand. I really like how things are broken down into small lessons. It made me wonder if I should try using a mouse.

The YouTube videos (Part 1: http://youtube.com/watch?v=S30OUYsu2Qo, Part 2: http://youtube.com/watch?v=jEcAD1cMWIY, Part 3: http://youtube.com/watch?v=sNL512ScRfs) for installing the Ubuntu Server were really helpful and easy. The only thing is that in the beginning, it starts with VMware server and I was using VMware Workstation, but that was no big deal. And I didn't have the problem in the end with the kernel issue. Mine restarted fine after the install. It was nice having it playing while I was doing it. It was reassuring to be able to see the same thing happening on my screen as in the videos.