SCD2 -- Is it for you?

There are two major differences between SCD1 and SCD2:

1) SCD1 includes substantial instructor-led discussion and step-by-step labs. SCD2, by contrast, focuses almost entirely on labs that challenge students to solve programming challenges using their own mettle.

2) SCD2 leans heavily on the student's ASP.NET background. If you aren't experienced with ASP.NET, the class simply isn't for you.

Does this mean that the class is a good match for experienced ASP.NET developers? Perhaps. Most of the significant topics in SCD2 are covered on the SDN site (SDN access required):

http://sdn5.sitecore.net/Reference/Field%20Reference.aspx
http://sdn5.sitecore.net/Snippets/Item%20Handling/Adding%20Items/Adding%20a%20new%20Item.aspx
http://sdn5.sitecore.net/Developer/Common%20API%20Classes.aspx
http://sdn5.sitecore.net/Articles/API/Using%20Events.aspx

If you are accustomed to learning through online documentation, the above references will familiarize you with the most important topics in the class.

If you are new to CMS, I recommend attending the SCD1 training and -- instead of SCD2 -- attending the Sitecore Day of Prototyping class. This class spends a day building a section of a basic website. The goals of the class are to revisit and reinforce the topics of SCD1 and provide useful code samples for common scenarios.