Education vs manuals

On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 16:27:39 -0000, "George Barbour" <gbarbour_at_csc.com> wrote:
>Oracle is a good and essential product. ...
>It has a very large and successful education and training arm.

Yes, that's an interesting division, with sharp people spread all over the world.

I'm curious how the cost/benefit analysis works for enrolling in a course or purchasing an online training product as opposed to purchasing a manual. What are the advantages people find that make the extra cost worthwhile? Some possibilities I can imagine are:

• Availability of pre-tested systems to work through exercises.
• Tutorial (step-by-step) nature of material.
• Access to instructor to answer questions.
• Better focus or completeness of code examples.

I'm also curious about the differences in purchasing and authorization:

• Are course enrollments usually funnelled through a company's education coordinator, while manuals are purchased by individual employees?
• Is it easier to sign up for a course because that money comes from an education budget, while the cost of a manual might come out of a department's budget?
• Is it standard practice to run everyone in a department through the same CD-based self-study course, while a manual on the same topic sits on one person's bookshelf?

John

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