In case you've been living under a rock, DrupalCon Paris is happening next week, and features, not one, but two Views Sessions, in addition to merlinofchaos' own CTools sessions on Panels 3 and CTools. One of them being, of course, by yours truly :-)
I will be privileged to open Drupalcamp and Drupalcon with the first of these Views sessions on tuesday 1300/1700, in the form of a 4-hour hands-on workshop, and on this occasion will attempt to give module developers attending this workshop the nudge they need to start coding on top of Views instead of doing their lists in hardcoded SQL+PHP. The workshop will be focused on the pratical aspects of integrating with Views and getting data into it and out of it (i.e. defining Handlers, Filters, arguments, and embedding Views). It will be light on data formatting and theory.
On the following day, the excellent Crell will give a more abstract lecture in the traditional DrupalCon session format, centered around the overall Views architecture, data formatting (plugins, themeing) and an example of access control plugin. Attendees of the first session are likely to also be interested by the second one to reinforce their newly-gained Views understanding.
The workshop is likely to be in english, but french will be available too, since this is Paris so don't be intimidated if your english isn't really fluent. See you there !