Disillusionment with Usenix tutorial

[Dave]

My company paid, I believe, in excess of $100 for me to attend the
Advanced C Programming tutorial at the last Usenix convention.  The
material presented therein was in no sense advanced programming in
any language.  The "instructor" spent hours going over details of
expression evaluation and other trivia of compiler implementation.

What I expected was a treatment of how the C language might be used
to advantage in various applications such as data base management,
graphics, etc.  What I got was a sophomoric, at best, review of the
contents of K&R's book, along with some additional information about
how the compiler processes its input - information which any competent
programmer will easily gather from experience in the first few months
of using a new compiler.

The presentation was certainly at a common level of sophistication with
most of the presentations at Usenix, tutorial or otherwise.  However,
I have become accustomed, through exposure to tutorials sponsored
by other organizations (such as IEEE), to being presented with
state-of-the-art information.  I came away from the tutorial speculating
that perhaps the instructor was a community-college level professional
educator who had never actually had to write any amount of useful code
in the course of his employment.

Were it not for the fact that attempting to obtain a refund of the money
which my company spent on my tutorial attendance would cost the company
far more than the amount of the refund, I would certainly make the attempt.
When one multiplies the tutorial fee by the number of attendees, the
resulting dollar amount is nauseating in view of the quality of the
presentation.