in reply to Requesting suggestions for one day Perl course

If they know C++, they can probably think for themselves and learn another language on their own. 1-day isn't enough time for spoonfeeding.

Given they'll be able to pick up the syntax (hopefully they will). I'd show off features and let them learn some on their own. Hashes since they won't be used to them, auto-vivification, all the goodies on CPAN for really obscure stuff that would be incredibly hard in C, the cleanliness of Tk (if they know Java for example, they'll probably hate Swing), functional programming to attempt to blow their minds, etc. They'll be coming back for more if you do it right...

Also, I think you need to give at least one example of something that is incredibly hard to do in most languages, done in one line of Perl code. Open with it. Something like "who is winning the most democratic primaries by scraping CNN" or stock prices or something like that.

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Re: Re: Requesting suggestions for one day Perl course
by talexb (Chancellor) on Mar 01, 2004 at 18:15 UTC

    I won't be spoon-feeding these students -- I hope to be teaching a university level course in Perl, the Perl Community, and by inference, talking about the Open Source community. To get into this program they had to have adequate C, so I'm going to blaze over for and while loops so we can get on to the cool stuff.

    I haven't used Tk and don't want to have to learn stuff for this seminar -- I'll stick with what I know.

    Scraping CNN is a neat idea .. I may even see if I can grab an RSS feed from somewhere and show them how it's done in just a few lines of Perl.

    Alex / talexb / Toronto

    Life is short: get busy!

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      Also, it may be obvious, but don't forget to plug PerlMonks as a great resource to go to once you have invested time to learn the language a bit. It has certaintly contributed to my love for the language. I think that's a huge advantage as this is a heavily-trafficked forum. Let them know the author of the llama and many other cool people post here and want to encourage learning and breaking the sound barrier (but this is not to say they shouldn't learn on their own too).

      Maybe run Erudil's Camel Code or Spiraling Quine or Mandelbrot flythrough just for kicks. Again, for the drool factor.

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