I'm the lead programmer at my company (okay, enough snickering ;-) and I've been asked to take a young VB programmer who wants to learn a more portable and more powerful language under my wing. At my small company, my position is pretty much writing 100% of the code on most projects, and checking up on small projects by other people. It could help me do more useful work if I can design a system and have this new potential hot shot give me subroutines to call. It could also be a nightmare of supervising someone with bad habits and trying to lay out a good learning track for him.

I've never been in a position to seriously guide the early development of a fledgling programmer before, and frankly it makes me a bit nervous. If anyone has suggestions on how to supplement the Llama and the Camel with real-life, face-to-face advisory sessions, I wouldn't mind hearing those.

I learned Perl with some background in other languages, the Camel, 1200 lines of source, perldoc, and a four-day deadline for major modifications (including 300 lines of new code). Although I like to jump into projects with both feet like this, I'm guessing I should take it a little easier on my student. What say the PerlMonks?

I know everyone learns differently and at different speeds, but there must be an art of finding how to teach a particular student a particular task. I hope to become at least half as good at teaching Perl programming as this kid hopes to be at learning it. Any suggestions on this are likewise welcome.

Chris

In reply to Offering a helping hand by mr_mischief

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