As for making theDamian rich through royalties, it'd be better just to hand him a $10 bill (USD or AUD) the next time you see him, because he gets only about US$2 for each book sale. Books are not a revenue stream, unless your last name is Grisham or King or something, as I disclosed in my "Writing about Perl" OSCON'03 talk.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

A 50% student discount brings the price down to $900 for four days or $250 for one. What student can afford that?

There are a great many highly-ranked universities where you can take a semester-long course for less than that. I'm surprised that anyone is willing to pay that amount. We need a few more bubble bursts to weed out this kind of silliness.

I'd also question the wisdom of charging such high rates. The lower the fee, the more people attending, the more people attending, the more people recommending the talks to others. It would be a nice thing to make accessible to a larger number of people. Then again you've got to make a living somehow, and there's always free PM meetings.

Although I do enjoy my snug, safe and warm ivory tower, I think you may be erring on the side of idealism.

One argument against lowering the price would be the increased class size, which would reduce the quality of instruction. I don't necessarily think they have "Perl for the Masses" in mind---the idea is to find a sort of sweet spot where you get the most possible participants at the highest possible rate. From what merlyn (who is on Stem Systems' "Board of Advisors") has written in this thread and what I had guessed in the first place, the cost of these classes reflects the market value of such services, at least from people such as Uri "uri" Guttman, Damian "theDamian" Conway and Randal "merlyn" Schwartz.

I don't know whether they all offer something similar, but Mark-Jason "dominus" Dominus (for example) will speak to any users' group for free---although he apparently has nothing against accepting money to speak. It might be interesting to see such announcements here as well. Perhaps we could even offer free publicity to people doing free talks.

--
Allolex

I too, am willing to speak to any group for free, and also speak for free at YAPC and short talks at OSCON.

But no matter how many people want me to speak for free, I still have to make a living at some point. And good courseware is very expensive. We've put about $150K of labor into the current Learning Perl slideset. If I had taught that at "academic" rates rather than "corporate" rates, we'd never have paid it off yet.

You also need to look at the return-on-investment for a company. Taking 30 hours of instruction of one of my courses, the employer spends $1800 to me and about $2500 of burdened cost (if the person makes a $80K/yr salary) for the employee to be in a training.

For that $4300, he'd need to see about one and a half extra weeks of productivity to make up for it. Presuming I make someone about 20% more efficient, that pays for itself within two months or so. It's simple, and justified. At $1800 per student, they're still paying more for the student to be idled than for my instruction, but it's the total expenditure between both that needs to be justified and returned. When you look at it that way, it's actually still pretty cheap.

To someone that's never made more than $20K/year, these numbers may look huge. But to the typical corporate Perl wrangler, these are competitive figures.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

class size is indeed a major factor. i have seen large (100-300) perl classes and they tend to be lectures with little interaction. same for most academic lectures. the smaller recitations are usually taught by grad students and not the top professors. damian's classes are limited to 20 students and there is plenty of room for personal interaction both in the class and during breaks. and i will wager you will learn more from damian in one (or all four) of these class days than almost any academic class at any school. this is real world perl that you will learn and be using the next week, not some blue sky conceptual CS stuff that will never be used by you in your career.

and if you don't like the tuition, no one says you have to attend. plenty of people find it worth their time and money (and some spend extra money to fly in and stay in hotels). these courses are for professionals working with perl every day and not for dabblers writing a few scripts. these professionals know a good course from a great teacher and the value they receive from it. and some students/underemployed only register for one class and pay $249.50 which is affordable to almost anyone.

also i have announced these classes on perlmonks before and not had any complaints. in fact banner ads were used on this site as well (i don't have banners done so if anyone want to do them for me i will offer a discount or pay for them)

and even if you can't afford the class you might know perl hackers who can or whose companies can. you can earn a 5% commission for enrolling others.

BTW, merlyn being on the board of advisors of Stem has nothing to do with these classes. he is just a friend who i can call on for advice. his opinions here are his own (as always) and didn't ask nor expect any comments from him.

uri

You are quite right. The thought occured to me partially through writing the original post that I was looking at it from the wrong perspective. There are plenty of low-cost direct training alternatives such as user groups, yapc, and very capable people willing to speak for cheap or free. I thought I'd finish the post anyways for the sake of discussion :)

Still from a business perspective I do not view such training as cost-effective. The alternatives of sending employees to yapc, or having someone come in and speak would often be far more effective.