Quick Course® Series
Overview
Quick Course® books show how to use the most useful features of popular software packages to create documents that can actually be used in the workplace. Ideal for both self-paced training and instructor-led classes, each Quick Course book offers 20 to 60 hours of quality, step-by-step instruction. Quick Course books are the textbooks of choice for many high schools, technical schools, community colleges, universities, training companies, and corporate training departments. Priced from $14.95 (with discounts for orders of 5 or more of the same title), they meet most instructional needs and are within most budgets.
Because of the hands-on, step-by-step nature of Quick Course training, each book functions as a fully self-contained instructional unit.
All the Quick Course training products are created by the same team of authors, so if you like one, you'll like them all!
View the Quick Course catalog.
Quick Course Training Philosophy
Are you just starting to learn a new computing skill? The Quick Course training series is designed so that you can do useful, independent work after following along with just the first few chapters. Subsequent chapters build on these basic skills, so that by the end of the book, you are equipped to tackle most of the common tasks you will need to perform—and many of the not-so-common ones, too!
To accomplish its purpose, Quick Course training is designed with an approach that we call Tell Me, Show Me, Let Me Do It.
- Tell Me. Each course consists of comprehensive, skill-based instruction that walks you through procedures one step at a time.
- Show Me. We don't just take a simple "do this, do that" approach, because when you've finished the course, we want you to be able to apply what you have learned to your own work. So the first time you perform a procedure we explain how you need to set things up and why, what's going on at each step, and what the results will be. And we include lots of screen shots so that you can check your work in progress. So there is never any question about what you need to do when.
- Let Me Do It. As you learn new skills and increase your proficiency, you work through procedures you have already learned on your own; you can refer back to earlier exercises at any time if you have questions.
The step-by-step instructions in each course are self-contained, meaning that you create the files you need as you go along, and no additional files are necessary.
Real-World Learning
For the main tutorial, we set the scene with a fictitious scenario so that all the files you create pertain to a single company or organization. Instead of providing files you've never seen before and asking you to perform an isolated task with them, we show you how to build files from scratch and gradually increase their level of sophistication and complexity. By the end of the course, you have created a set of files that you might want to recycle for your own purposes—and what's more, you'll know how!
Extended Learning
For instructor-led classes, some courses have supplemental materials that allow tasks to be addressed on three levels:
- In the tutorial, you walk through each new task step by step. The tutorial explains what's going on and shows all the buttons and icons to be clicked, all the dialog boxes that are displayed, and what the results should be.
- In an exercise, you are given the task to perform again. You are given step-by-step instructions for completing the task, but without any of the hand-holding and screen shots used in the tutorial.
- In a review exercise, you are given the task a third time. However, the review exercise simply states the objective and leaves it up to you to use the skills you have acquired to reach the objective.
The supplemental materials also include quizzes that assess how well the topics in the chapters have been grasped.
Separate workbooks containing exercises, review exercises, and quizzes are available for some 97 Series and 2000 Series courses. Education Editions incorporating all of the above features are available for some XP/2002 Series courses.