Phoenix.pm: Training

Scott Walters scott at illogics.org
Fri Aug 15 17:45:38 CDT 2003


Hi Tom and company, 

I've seen courseware from 3 day seminars and it, uh, left a lot to be desired.
Especially the "advanced" ones. 

I'm writing this with no knowledge of your skill level, so please forgive me.
I'm just running the gauntlet here:

My advice is call area technical colleges about the availability of night/evening
classes. I can't remember who, but one of our own perlmongers was teaching just
such a course and perhaps still is. This is an effectively a directed study,
which checks in place to make sure that important tidbits aren't missed and a
safety net if you get lost (okey, I'm mixing metaphores, time to stop). 
Ongoing education at a college looks far better on a resume than stupid
seminars anyway. Any technical college's Perl class is likely to be fairly
comprehensive but suited to relative novices at the same time. It won't move
quite as quickly as a seminar, but it will be a lot more thorough.

Far better than a seminar for a novice is a copy of "Learning Perl" from
O'Reilly or WROX's (now free) "Beginning Perl" at 
http://learn.perl.org/library/beginning_perl/ - the language will get a fair
treatment, common problems people have will be discussed, common idioms
explained, resources mentioned, and pointers to where to find solutions
to more difficult problems given - none of which I've seen in a seminar.

The best thing to do to get your fingers on the pulse of Perl is go to Perl
conferances like YAPC. http://perl.com always has one or two of those listed.
Or is that perl.oreilly.com? I can never remember. You'll meet lots of really
interesting people (I'm told) including people elevated to legendary status
by the Perl community, and there are multiple lecture tracks, on all subjects,
for all skill levels. People I talk to that have made those things say they
just go to the lightning talk and listen to 5 minute lectures all day for
extreme highbandwidth braindumpage. But that of course requires hotel and
busfair.

If you have 20-30 people all interested in expanding their skills, a lot of
the Perl community elders do training. Randal Schwartz comes to mind, but
I know there are others. He will come to your location and teach a class,
and the man has plenty of stuff in his head to make it intresting to 
everyone, reguardless of their skill level.

Last but not least, Phoenix Perl Mongers usually has some lecture or another 
coming up. I work hard to make sure that there are plenty of advanced
topics in the track =) Short of YAPC, I expect this is the most advanced
treatment Perl will get, in town. Unless the topic doesn't happen to be
advanced. Which does happen now and then. It is normally free, but if
you want to bring baked goods, you're welcome to ;)

-scott

On  0, Doug Miles <doug.miles at bpxinternet.com> wrote:
> 
> Tom Achtenberg wrote:
> > Hi all, I have the luxury right now of having my company willing to send me to some Perl training.  I'm a beginner so I need it from the start.  What local Phoenix area companies offer Perl training?
> > 
> > 
> 
> I'm not aware of any.  Anyone else?  If you don't find a solution, 
> contact me off list, and we might be able to make arrangements:
> 
> perlguy at earthlink.net
> 
> If you do find someone, feel free to post it, as someone else might find 
> it useful.
> 
> Doug Miles
> 



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