I am an UK based engineer with a broad background in the design and implementation of hardware and embedded software but very limited experience of Linux.

I am about to start a project involving a PowerPC running embedded linux and am trying to decided between attending the Feabhas 'Developing for Embedded Linux' coarse or learning from books and the web.

Any opinions gratefully received

Learn from books and the web. The 'CLFS' project (built on Linux From Scratch) is a good place to start. Count on spending a few months writing your build scripts and trimming as much unnecessary stuff as you can. LFS/CLFS do skip over a few important things though, so don't count on it giving you all you need to know about setting up an embedded gizmo.

Hmm... come to think of it - don't bother with paper books - they're mostly obsolete by the time they're printed. There's enough good material on the web (and an awful lot of truly awful material).

Do you have an initial target system? That is, have you bought a board, complete with bvoard support package, the exact details of which will vary by vendor, that you can use to try out stuff?

If you have, you should look into how exactly the supplier has done what they have done and play around with some interesting bits and pieces in order to get a feel for what is going on.

If you haven't, you should probably consider doing so.

Jello is good.