Mapping isnt as difficult as people make out IMHO, ive never managed to melt or otherwise damage an engine doing it so far, and I have had utterly no formal tuition at all, Ive just figured it out as ive gone along, although I have certainly benefitted from conversations on the subject from people like Stu@MSD a couple of years ago and even more so with Mark Shead from MA Developments who has given me a lot of advice and tips over the years Ive known him.

Im in the position of having a background education including physics and chemistry, and I had about half a dozen years experience of building and tuning engines on carbs and dizzy setups first before I ever touched any mapping software, so potentially others might not find it as simple as I did. I guess it also helps that I have written large scale realtime control software projects that make car ECU's look very simple indeed as they process so little information compared to the stuff I am used to working on, so I suppose that gave me the confidence to try, I guess this is the other major stumbling block to people, a lack of confidence.

On the whole I would say the KEY thing is to understand engines, rather than computers, and this is something that people seem to constantly misunderstand, I know people who are barely computer litterate who are excellent mappers as they are so experienced with what an engine wants.
Wether you use a carb or a dizzy or a laptop to increase or decrease timing and fuelling, is not the key thing, its that you understand that the engine wants more or less in the first place.

From what Ive heard the EFI101 course is pretty good as an introduction considering its only about a week long.