Intro to Perl

John Sechrest sechrest at peak.org
Sun Feb 10 09:59:32 CST 2002


 
	Pre-screening and pre-filtering the class people coming in
	is an excellent way to speed up the class. 

	In the classes that I teach, I find that I spend a good 
	deal of time trying to please the extremes. The more
	you can eliminate both the people at the top end
	who know most of it and the people at the bottom end
	who are not up to speed, the more effective your class
	can be.

	I have tried in the past to solve this problem by setting
	up 3 classes:

	   Perl for the self taught
	   A perl introduction
	   and scripting for novices


	But from a marketing point of view, this does not work well
	at all.



Curtis Poe <poec at yahoo.com> writes:

 % --- "Randal L. Schwartz" <merlyn at stonehenge.com> wrote:
 % > In 8 hours, you can spend 4 hours "in depth" getting to a sample
 % > program that uses decision and repetition (if, while) and scalars.
 % > But you probably won't get to arrays.  But then you can use the other
 % > 4 hours to do a quick "survey of the remaining land", and show example
 % > syntax for each of the other concepts... just enough to say "Perl can
 % > do this, and here's how to find out where".  Maybe it's more sales
 % > than training, but if you whet the appetitite, and at least give good
 % > keywords so they know what we're talking about, they'll feel OK to
 % > come to the meetings.  In 4 hours you can probably cover 200 bullet
 % > points at a minute or so a piece.  So just pick 200 mini-topics and
 % > give a sample line of code.  You can group them (maybe 20 each on
 % > array and hash) for better comprehension.
 % > 
 % > That's probably what I'd do with 8 hours for a newbie.
 % 
 % Thanks for that.  Since you do this for a living, I suspect you *probably* know what you're
 % talking about ;)
 % 
 % Quick question:  I think I want to make them work through Learning Perl's "Whirlwind Tour" and
 % email me the results as the price of admission.  I'd request a minor change such as "take out the
 % part of the program that gives people with the username of Randal a back door" (since it doesn't
 % check to see if "Randal" has a password) to make sure they actually *did* something rather than
 % just download the code from somewhere.  If they accomplish that, is it realistic to assume that
 % the class could move along faster?
 % 
 % Cheers,
 % Curtis
 % 
 % =====
 % "Ovid" on http://www.perlmonks.org/
 % Someone asked me how to count to 10 in Perl:
 % push at A,$_ for reverse q.e...q.n.;for(@A){$_=unpack(q|c|,$_);@a=split//;
 % shift at a;shift at a if $a[$[]eq$[;$_=join q||, at a};print $_,$/for reverse @A
 % 
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-----
John Sechrest          .         Helping people use
CEO PEAK -              .           computers and the Internet
Public Electronic         .            more effectively
Access to Knowledge,Inc       .                      
1600 SW Western, Suite 180       .            Internet: sechrest at peak.org
Corvallis Oregon 97333               .                  (541) 754-7325
                                            . http://www.peak.org/~sechrest
TIMTOWTDI



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