G'day chrestomanci,

I went to the O'Reilly Perl page to find you a link to Learning Perl and immediately found two others of interest. If you hunt around, there may be others.

• Learning Perl, 6th Edition
• Learning Perl Student Workbook, 2nd Edition
• Beginning Perl

Follow the links for more information, reviews, prices, formats, etc. The first two have exercises and separate answers to the exercises.

You might also consider using the online documentation; although, while that has many examples, it doesn't have exercises.

• perlintro -- a brief introduction and overview of Perl: This introduces concepts in an order appropriate for someone learning to program; starting with sequence/selection/iteration and then moving into I/O, subroutines and more advanced topics.
• perl - The Perl 5 language interpreter: This is the main perl manpage. It has a Tutorials section; there's tutorials in other sections but they're mostly of a more advanced nature (at least for someone with little or no programming experience). The Reference section would probably provide a useful adjunct to whatever books you choose.

I haven't used Strawberry Perl for a couple of years but I'd be surprised if it wasn't "sufficient"; it certainly would've been when I last used it (maybe v5.10.x).

Perl is a very good programming language for starters. The nice thing is that you can start with simple things and that once your students advance in knowledge you can introduce more advanced concepts, yet even with the simple elements they have learned in the beginning they can already write working and useful programs.

A simple "beginners level" book is "Perl for Beginners", freely available at BookBoon.

If you are on Windows, Strawberry Perl is indeed a good choice. Padre isn't installed by default, but as it is just another module, you can install it yourself from CPAN.

Maybe start by teaching programming using http://www.alice.org/ or http://www.squeakland.org/ or some such ( Logo Turtle ), before moving onto perl?

Below is some food for thought, a recurring theme is know-your-audience, be-a-hero(solve something they frequently encounter as they watch), teach/work towards solving a real problem that interests them

You gotta start by introducing variables(buckets), how to put stuff in them (interpolation), when they live/die (scope), ... basically do a few walk throughs of how a program runs (now the bucket is empty...)

Then move onto introducing file+folder model, how files work (files are iterators), but don't delve into readdir. Teach File::Find::Rule for obtaining a list of paths. Maybe Path::Class/Path::Tiny for working with paths. no readdir, its too low-level.

Then give overview of the process model (STDIN/STDOUT/STDERR/@ARGV) and the shell

Then have the beginner start solving that real problem they're interested in

Ask what is the goal of program? Ask what next change should do? What series of steps should play part? What input/output/result/effect? How to go organise it? ... design the program on paper before start writing it, backing up incremental improvements as you guide over beginners shoulder -- after the initial planning session (which beginner adds as comments ) you be quiet until they're done, then you review together -- ask beginner to describe step/by/step how the program works, then run the program and see what happens, then praise the things that correct, explain any misunderstandings , and make backup and have the beginner fix the program while you wait

By the time you're done with buckets you'd have 10-30 small programs, at least half typed by the beginner Each new metaphor/model/topic should start with your writing a file as beginner watches, then beginner writing a file, fixing typos, dumpering , fixing thinkos, repeat, you-review-together, you-fix-for-beginner (add comments to file explaining any typos/thinkos and how to overcome them), beginner-type-fixes .... and you end up with 10-50 small files the beginner can review

Naturally this type of 1-on-1/master/guru-style learning requires explicit agreement/willingness from both parties -- its very effective , esp if both teacher/learner are nice and positive and eager... The important dynamic to develop is STOP - Stop, Think, Observe, Plan then Act then repeat STOP ; In no time at all you'll both be thinking like computers, you'll know where to look (what to dumper), what to expect, what to call it ... how to know what you mean, ask questions the smart way

Also, while you're discussing how to solve each task/goal/step walk the beginner through RTFM-ing a couple of times, from checking the faqs( perlfaq4#How can I get the unique keys from two hashes? ) to searching the docs, to searching the perlmonks :)

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

Strawberry Perl does not come with Padre or the needed Wx modules for Padre, but those can be installed from CPAN. An alternative would be DWIM Perl for Windows, which is Strawberry Perl 5.14.2.1 32-bit and does include Padre and a number of other modules too.

Have a look at http://perlmaven.com/.

McA

You might recommend to her that she enroll in the Coursera course titled Learn to Program: The Fundamentals (University of Toronto). This online course is seven weeks long and doesn't presume any prior programming experience. The only requirement is a good grasp of grade school math. The course started last week, but if she enrolls right away, I'm sure she can catch up quickly.

Have your colleague read the tutorials/books suggested above, at least the first 100/150 pages to get a grasp of the basic notions.

Then have her subscribe to comp.lang.perl.misc or this site and read the messages and their replies, progressively trying to find an answer to the questions asked.

This is how I learned; I applied this technique for a 5 day course with a C programmer with twice my experience; it's very interesting for the student and you have no work to do.