Manta Technologies: Your Resource for IBM i Training
Manta offers a complete library of courses for programmers, operators, system administrators, and users of the IBM i operating system, which runs on IBM Power Systems.
All of our courses are web based and run in all popular browsers.
Curriculum Recommendations
With a library of 140 Manta courses and competency exams at your fingertips, selecting what courses are best for you or your employees can seem like an overwhelming task. As you should expect, Manta provides several tools to help with this process.
From this web site, the "Courses" link in the menu above is your best starting point. It provides multiple menus to the detailed course descriptions.
- Every course and exam is listed in alphabetical order in the Quick Course Index.
- The Courses by Subject menu arranges the courses into major groupings, including "System Use", "System Operation", "Programming", "System Administration", and "eBusiness."
- Perhaps the most useful is the Courses by Audience menu, which gives specific curriculum recommendations for various job functions. This menu is also available when taking a course. To access it, select "Curriculum Guide" under the Handy Links option.
When Manta started 28 years ago, most of the curriculum recommendations had a single path for each job function. While these paths still exist, you should be aware that alternative paths are also available.
For example, all entry-level students — regardless of their job functions — should start with the Introduction to the IBM i Environment series, which provides an overview of IBM i concepts and facilities. It also teaches the various ways to access an IBM i system, including the green-screen interface and newer tools such as the browser-based IBM Navigator for i.
For programmers, the IBM i Programming Environment series should come next. It covers IBM i programming concepts and introduces the available development tools, which are covered in detail in later series.
From this point, the programming curriculum branches, depending on your language of choice. While most programmers will need to learn Control Language (CL) programming, Manta offers separate series of courses covering RPG, COBOL, and Java. In addition, the eBusiness for IBM i Programmers series covers additional skiils needed by web developers, including the programming of HTML documents, JavaScript programs, CSS scripts, and AJAX routines. CGI programs and Net.Data are also covered.
Even with a particular language, a student's study path may vary, depending on the tools the installation makes available and the programming techniques it prefers. For example, a traditional RPG programmer using the green-screen Program Development Manager (PDM) might take the following:
- The RPG Programming series
- The Working with DB2 Databases series
- Using Screen Design Aid (SDA)
- Using the ILE Source-Level Debugger
- The Using Rational Developer for i (RDi) series
- The Free-Form RPG Programming series
- The Using Structured Query Language (SQL) series
Whatever your requirements, Manta has you covered.
Custom Menus
After signing on, every Manta student receives a default menu that gives access to every course and exam the organization has licensed. This may offer the student too much information, particular if you license the entire IBM i Training Library.
As an alternative, your training administrator can assign a student to a specific menu which includes a subset of the courses that are available to your organization as a whole. Manta provides sample menus for the job functions listed in the Curriculum Guide. Someone assigned to the IBM i Operations menu, for example, will not see the courses available for system administrators or programmers.
The training administrator also has the ability to define custom menus that reflect your installations particular requirements. Starting with the default menu (which shows everything you have a license to use), the administrator can select courses and put them in any order. Once stored, the custom menu can be assigned to any number of students.
Special Introductory Price: Free!
A typical Manta course takes two to three hours to complete. This was designed so that even the slowest student should be able to finish a complete course in a morning or an afternoon. Thanks to the efficiencies inherent with web-based training, the amount of material covered is roughly equivalent to that of a one-day seminar presented in a traditional classroom setting.
Given the attention spans of typical adult learners, each course is divided into six to eight sessions, each 15 to 20 minutes long. This lets the student take breaks as needed or respond to "emergencies" from the office.
Rather than providing cherry-picked references or a list of our thousands of customers world-wide, Manta has always felt that you are the best judge of what will work in your organization. To enable you to perform a detailed review of our product, we let you take the first session of any course in the IBM i Training Library for free. These are not the "bait-and-switch" demos provided by some vendors, but the actual training provided by MantaNow!, our Internet delivery system. In all, approximately 140 sessions — totalling over 40 hours of training — are available for free. If that can't convince you that Manta provides the best and most cost-effective training in the IBM i marketplace, then nothing will!
You can take a sample session by drilling down to any individual course, starting from Courses in the navigation bar above. When you get to the description for a course, click the Sample Sessions tab. For detailed instructions, see Sample Sessions under the Options link.