http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=1050917

chrestomanci has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings wise brothers. I have a question concerning our evangelical mission to spread the good news of perl to our initiates who wish to learn it's great power.

I have been approached at work by a colleague from the marketing department. She has asked me to teach her programming in perl during break times. My boss is happy for me to do this provided I don't do so in work time. The colleague has a scientific education, but no prior experience I computer programming.

The problem is that I have no idea how to teach programming to a novice, and I don't know what text book to use. There is a copy of the Camel Book available, as well as some more advanced perl programming books, but nothing for beginners.

Can you recommend a suitable text book for a beginner? Hopefully something with some exercises in, so that I don't have to think up lots of simple programming problems.

Is the current Strawberry perl distro sufficient as a programming environment? Is Padre included these days?

More fundamentally, do you think that perl is a suitable language for a beginner? Or would it be better to find a teaching language such as scratch for the fundamentals (variables, loops, functions etc), before moving on to perl?