My employer is offering me the chance to go on a RH training course and I was wondering, if anyone has been on one, what people thought of their courses and how relevant they were.

I'm considering either the "Linux Programming Essentials" or the "Linux Device Driver Programming" course.

I'm experienced in many programming languages, including C, and have a reasonable knowledge on how to create Makefiles, shell scripts and use vi.

My question would be, would the programming essentials course be irrelevant/boring to me, or would I struggle to cope with the (more interesting sounding, and in my opinion useful) "Device Driver Programming" course without doing the "Essentials" first?

sounds very interesting....i think u can read selected chapters
from the book on unix programming by steven.....that will give
you enough background material for understanding the course
of your choice....

J-Stew's 2 cents worth:

I would recommend that if you are a programmer to go for the device driver training. That is really the nuts and bolts to getting things to run with Linux.

The question is : Are you really familiar with Linux? As a workstation? As a server? If you have no plans for Linux Sys Admin then I wouldnt try to become an expert at that. So far from what I've seen, people who take the path of least resistance (i.e. mcse, networking-basic and mid-range) get paid the least. How many Linux "Gurus" actually write drivers for hardware? If you can write code to a level that hardware gets what you're saying then I think you're one of the "elite."

Then again, though, just one man's opinion.

I'm certainly interested in the "nuts and bolts" of Linux but don't necessarily want to write device drivers every day of the week, although I have written drivers in the past in RTL/2 to speak to PLC's, flow meters and the like. It's the outer edges and the fundamentals of the course that interests me.

My main worry is that by skipping the essentials course my memory will be a little rusty in certain areas such as semaphores, makefiles and IPC's. However, a quick on-the-fly root in a book or man page would get my brain re-oiled - it really depends on how complicated they want to get!
I can find my way around the kernel and the environment, but from the server/sys admin point I'd be floundering a bit. Mind you, that's what the man pages and various Linux books are for. I'm more than happy to dive in at the deep end without a life guard. (Fortunately, I can play with (and break!) a Linux server without causing problems to others)
I'd hardly call that being "elite" as you're only using all that nasty stuff those devilishly clever "guru" types wrote.

Well... you did ask! :-)