Greetings wise brothers. I have a question concerning our evangelical mission to spread the good news of perl to our initiates who wish to learn it's great power.

I have been approached at work by a colleague from the marketing department. She has asked me to teach her programming in perl during break times. My boss is happy for me to do this provided I don't do so in work time. The colleague has a scientific education, but no prior experience I computer programming.

The problem is that I have no idea how to teach programming to a novice, and I don't know what text book to use. There is a copy of the Camel Book available, as well as some more advanced perl programming books, but nothing for beginners.

Can you recommend a suitable text book for a beginner? Hopefully something with some exercises in, so that I don't have to think up lots of simple programming problems.

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

More fundamentally, do you think that perl is a suitable language for a beginner? Or would it be better to find a teaching language such as scratch for the fundamentals (variables, loops, functions etc), before moving on to perl?

In reply to How to teach perl to novice programer by chrestomanci

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.