What is on Your Mind?

Hi,

This forum is great, I lurk here a lot and use a lot of what is posted here to help expand my skills. I have taken zero computer courses my entire life and for the most part and self taught. I am a Systems Administrator for a public school system that runs a 1:1 (6,000 Macbooks, 2,000+ Mac Desktops, 35 Xserves) and I oversee most of the back end stuff that we do with the Macs. I went to college, but not for computers, and it is something that I just naturally pick up.

I write shell scripts all the time now to automate everything from imaging, package management, dummy receipt systems, inventory options, and so forth. I also write a bit in perl and Apple Script. A few years ago I could barely use the command line, now I am writing code.

I have a ton of books and I read all the time, but am looking to bump up my skills to the next level. I have looked at some colleges in my area (Kansas City) to see if they offer any Unix courses and they do, but they don't really seem that good. In fact, when I read over the course outline I think that half the class would waste my time. That is, the only courses offered are, Unix basics, then right into Solaris. Which is cool, but I don't use anything from Sun, and my current job I deal with Unix (mostly apple) and Linux boxes, and not a single Sun box at all.

I am thinking about emailing the professor and asking if I can sit in the class for free, but get absolutely no credit for it and maybe I can help out or trade some work for him to make it an even trade.

I am not looking at becoming a full on developer either. I really like deductive problem solving, and I like it when people tell me something can't be done and I prove them wrong. I think I want to stay in the Sys Admin field and work with severs, services, package deployment, imaging, and automation. I also dabble a bit in web development, and am kind of working on a side project (which has barely begun) for a web based product so I am trying to learn how to call shell from PHP so I can build a web front end for what I want to do.

I have a ton of books, but not every book out there. I learn best I think hands on with an explanation of how or why something is done. I would not be opposed to doing online courses I guess, but have no clue if any are worth it or not.

I basically want to fix any of my bad habits I have developed coding things, and expand my knowledge of the few languages I would like to know.

Not sure if I should have posted this here....sorry if it is the wrong forum

Thanks

Tom