By David Gewirtz
Ah, programming is such sweet sorrow. No matter how experienced you are as a programmer, there's always something new to learn. And if you're switching development environments or using new tools, there's yet more you need to learn.
While professional development training can be costly, we've recently found some excellent Notes and Domino training courses where you can learn some skills simply for the cost of the time it takes to download the lessons.
We've reviewed a many of the Lotus courses offered by The Learning Continuum Company (TLCC) over the years. In each case, the course reviewed got excellent ratings. When we found out they were offering some training from their Beginning LotusScript for Notes Domino 7 course for free, it was a no-brainer for us to share that information with you.
Getting started
Our hands-on experience with the course began by following the link shown at the end of this article. We had to register with the site, and then wait about 30 minutes for a download link to arrive in the DominoPower email box.
This course runs inside of Notes 7, so be sure you've got that installed before you install the TLCC course itself.
During installation, we found two gotchas that might confuse you if you're not sure what to look for. First, the course installs itself at the very top level of your C: drive, not in the Notes data directory. Then, upon completion of the install, the TLCC installer launches Notes and complains it can't find the course file.
This is very easy to overcome. Simply move the TLCC data directory from C:\ to your Notes data directory. Then, inside Notes, navigate into the TLCC course directory in your Notes data directory and open schedule.nsf.
Notes, as you know, is very careful about security. When you first run Beginning LotusScript for Notes Domino 7, you'll see a lot of security alerts like that shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
TLCC is pretty trustworthy. Go ahead and execute the action. (click for larger image)
TLCC is pretty trustworthy. Go ahead and execute the action. These warnings are far from unusual in Notes, but given this is a training course that might be for rank beginners, it can be a little intimidating.
The training itself
Once you get past the minor installation hurdles, you'll see a Notes database like that shown in Figure B.
FIGURE B
Just start digging through this informative Notes database. (click for larger image)
At this point, it's important to be clear that these courses are used as demos to get you to buy the full product. When you download Beginning LotusScript for Notes Domino 7, you'll get the first three modules to use for free. If you want to go beyond those three modules, you'll need to buy the course.