Alliance Re-Launches Programme-Led Apprenticeships

Alliance Learning is reintroducing its programme-led apprenticeships (PLAs) in order to ease work-related pressures for young people. Short intensive courses, specially designed to help learners acquire their desired qualifications in a much smaller timeframe, PLAs can be completed in as little as 12 weeks.

The company offers PLAs in business administration, children’s care learning and development, health and social care, ITQ, mechanical and electrical and fabrication and welding. Training is carried out at one of Alliance Learning’s three fully equipped training centres, where the company will help students to find a work placement right for them and their desired career path.

The company aims to help all its PLA learners find a full-time role after the completion of their course that will help them continue onto their advanced apprenticeship. To assist funding throughout the duration of the course, Alliance Learning will pay EMA (if eligible) and for any travel expenses incurred.

Sycode Publishes CAD Guide

Sycode has released a book entitled ‘OpenCAD – A Step-by-Step Guide to Developing a Professional CAD Application’, by the company’s chief executive, Deelip Menezes. The book showcases the technologies offered by the Open Design Alliance. ‘I have been keeping a close eye on the ODA and its technologies for some time now,’ said Menezes. ‘Sycode is a sustaining member of the ODA and I have been writing about the issues surrounding the ODA on my blog.

‘By means of this book, I am taking it a step further by emphasising the fact that the ODA is not only about reverse engineering the DWG file format. ‘They offer far more than that,’ she added. The book is written as a short story describing the evolution of a CAD application called OpenCAD. The reader starts with an empty Visual C++ project.

In each chapter, the reader adds features to OpenCAD, first making it a DWG reader, then a viewer and finally an editor. The reader ends up with a professional CAD application complete with an AutoCAD-like command prompt and plug-in architecture, thereby giving it the ability to be extended by means of DRX plug-ins. The book is divided into two sections.

Section one deals with creating the basic OpenCAD application, wiring it up with ODA libraries and adding features to make it a full professional 3D DWG viewer. Section two deals with adding a command prompt, plug-in architecture and developing a DRX plug-in that converts it into a DWG editor. The book can also be used as a primer for developing DRX plug-ins, since the plug-ins developed for OpenCAD also work with any DWGdirect-hosted application such as Bricscad V9. The book comes with complete C++ source code and is available as a paperback as well as a PDF ebook.