if someone is really ambitious, they could translate the "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" book from Green Tea Press into Perl (Java, C++, and Python versions currently exist and all are made available for free online).

anders pearson

I'm ambitious enough to do something of that scale, I'll take a look at one of the existing versions and see if that fits the idea of the beginner's tutorial thats floating around in my head. Thanks!

I don't have any suggestions for your first question because I had some solid background on the basics of procedural programming, and so didn't ever have the need for the kind of resource you're looking for. Best of luck!

My personal feelings about it being a first language, however, will probably run counter to others here. I don't really think its the best starter language. If I were to lead people into programming, I'd move them through the web route: HTML->JavaScript (or something similar). Yes, yes, HTML isn't a language, blah blah. Its a good starter point to understand structure, which I've learned most people don't understand to begin with.

Perl is very Cish, which I find to be difficult to deal with. Sure, its FAR better than C for most daily tasks, but I think that the complexity of regular expressions is enough to chase off any newbie in programming, and that's one of the most widely used (and important) aspects of Perl. On the flip side are things like VB or Java, which force the programmer into long complex if/thens, or case statements, but also force structured thinking about what the person wants to happen.

Purdue University's (my employer) School of Technology is using VB as a starting language, but I believe their shift is going toward Java. To me, this is a pointer to the relative simplicity of the languages compared to others, and perhaps toward their perception of its relative usefulness. Perl is offered, and taken widely, but the other two have been given more weight.

So, take my comments as you like, and good luck in your endeavors.

The discussion of Perl as a beginning language I refered to is at node_id=187006. I've seen too many people in starting CS classes absolutely shellshocked by Java, and people in my collage's "Computer programming in C++ for Physicists" introduction can't get into it (C++) if they don't have prior background. In my opinion, it doesn't get much better than Perl for teaching the idea of programming (i.e. "Here we're going to take the problem's solution and break it down into the smallest steps possible...") and the time spent learning Perl more than pays for itself once you become proficient. Thanks again! ~Adam

I have learned first programming at school with Pascal (and that seems to be common in germany) and although i learned Perl faster apart from school and i think Pascal is terribly ugly, it is a good language to learn the basics. You have to be explicit, you have to predeclare things, you see all stuff that happens. I think Perl is possible to learn as first language (and it's likely to be the last language then :), but you risk to learn a lot of Bad Things that Perl allows you (and beginners often don't see why they should tell perl to restrict them) and nasty Pascal would just not know. Learning Perl after such a scientific language helps you to start and you automatically avoid some mistakes.

But the language you learn is only the one thing, it's also important how you learn it and how busy you are. There are a lot of those "Script Kiddies" around that have learned Perl (and more often their tool is PHP) from bad online tutorials or bad books or even worse scripts and do not know a bit of the CS background and don't want to know and think it's not necessary. I think it's most important.

btw.: Learning Perl as a First (programming) language

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http://fruiture.de

Short version: Perl is too helpful to make a good intro language for career programmers. (Then again, so is pretty much any other language, from Java to Lisp.) Start with a sane assembly language, move to C, go from there.

Longer version: Re: Learning Perl as a First (programming) language

(Lest you think I'm some sort of Real Programmer type, or even a C evangelist, I try to avoid C for most purposes, and I think you should, too. Perl is usually good enough, and if it isn't, Lisp is usually better. I've applied too many patches and read too many BUGTRAQ advisories to advocate C for general systems programming. That said, sometimes you need low level system access, blazing speed, or both, and sometimes the only language bindings you have are to C... and if you haven't learned from the start to check buffer lengths and malloc's return values, well, I'll probably be reading about your software on BUGTRAQ.)

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F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
Found a typo in this node? /msg me
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!

Not to go too far aside but in the Physics ciriculum we teach the new students things that are utterly false, and we do so for a reason. We start with Newtonian physics, we tell them all sorts of things, we even give them a formula for the work done by kinetic friction that is so wrong as to be silly, but why? Because we take whats correct and simplify it so that the student can see the forest through the trees. If a new student was mired adding things like relativistic effects to their problems they would entirely miss the point of starting out in the program, not learning physics but learning how to do physics.

I think that C and Java give you enough rope to hang yourself with in this department. There is enough that has to be thought about and enough that has to be done a certain way that (in my experience) students don't spend enough time learning how to program well. It's my opinion that the above that you noted can be learned after the basics with no ill consequences. With a proper helping hand in learning the basics, nothing will have to be unlearned from developing bad habits either.

I feel a need, with plaintext being so poor at expressing the emotions of the writer compared to conversation, to explicitly note that there is no malice in the above and I am very thankful for your opinions. ~Adam

There is enough that has to be thought about and enough that has to be done a certain way that (in my experience) students don't spend enough time learning how to program well.

Actually, this is one reason why I suggest starting with a sane assembly language, probably in a simulated environment. (My university's using spim for this purpose, although the intro assembly course is well into the comp.sci. curriculum.) The scope of the programs, especially the first programs, are so limited that the students don't have the opportunity to get overwhelmed with detail, so they're free to concentrate on the basics of what they're doing.

Further, programming in assembly gets out of hand so quickly (if you let it) that some good programming practices, like descriptive names (for labels and such), subroutines, even stuff like unit tests are actually emphasized, rather than ignored. I've never seen an introductory programming course taught in assembly, but I imagine it could be very successful at teaching basic programming practices.

It's my opinion that the above that you noted can be learned after the basics with no ill consequences. With a proper helping hand in learning the basics, nothing will have to be unlearned from developing bad habits either.

In my experience, students who have learned to program in "helpful" languages have a difficult time taking over the chores of memory management, bounds checking, and so on when they switch to a lower-level language like C or assembly, because the languages (and, usually, the instruction) hide the workings of the computer to the degree that students aren't prepared (or inclined) to think of memory as a finite resource that must be explicitly allocated and freed, or pointers as things that can point to unexpected places, or strings as having finite length, etc. Sure, this sort of careful programming (really, the issue at hand is resource management) can be learned after the basics, but it often isn't. There is a lot of ground to cover in a standard comp.sci. curriculum beyond the basics without including extra material on basic software engineering.

I feel a need, with plaintext being so poor at expressing the emotions of the writer compared to conversation, to explicitly note that there is no malice in the above and I am very thankful for your opinions.

No worries. :-)

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F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
Found a typo in this node? /msg me
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!

open( FILE, "<myfilecontainingagigofdata");
my @FILE = <FILE>;
close FILE;
[download]

danger's "Elements of Programming with Perl is a general introduction to programming, using Perl as the implementation language". More links: Manning's page, /. review, Amazon page

I've read this book hoping to use it my teaching but was confess I was disappointed.

While it does cover some of the topics a beginning applications programmer needs (specification, documentation, etc), and while it does cover perl, (arrays, hashes, etc), in my opinion it does not do well at introducing many of the fundamental notions of programming and computer science - dealing with complexity, fundamental algorithms, and so on. Once you're past the "how to think like an applications engineer" opening, the book walks through the features of the perl language much as Learning Perl or many of the other Perl books.

At least for my purposes, teaching an introduction to computer science as a discipline within the liberal arts, this book didn't really do the trick.

There are two books that I'd recommend for teaching Perl to people with no programming experience. They are Elements of Programming with Perl and Perl for Web Site Management. You've already said that the first of those doesn't meet your requirements as it doesn't teach enough programming theory - the second teaches even less (it's more of a "getting things done book"). The best book for teaching Perl in a more formal "computer science" manner is probably Perl: The Programmer's Companion - tho' I seem to remember that it expected the reader to have at least some prior programming experience.

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

From the preface of Perl: The Programmer's Companion:

The aim of this book is to introduce programmers to Perl, and Perl to programmers.
...
[This book] is not a tutorial on computer programming. It is a book aimed at people who already know something -- possibly quite a lot -- about programming, and at least a little about computer science.

He goes on to describe himself as a computer scientist, which he claims isn't always an compliment in the perl world.

So, I think you're right on both accounts. Its not meant for newbies, and it takes a more formal approach than most other perl books.

-Blake