I'm going to give you a radical suggestion: Don't teach Perl at all.

You say, I am not trying to teach Perl. But then you start talking about writing a small app, teaching scalars, regexes. IMHO, "brief explanation" and "regex" don't belong in the same sentence. The more I think about what (I think) you're trying to do, the less I'm convinced that writing a program will achieve what you want.

From the sound of it, what people are asking you is "How do I join the club?" not "How do I program in Perl?" I think you've reached the same conclusion, or you wouldn't be trying to structure the class like this. So consider taking out items 1 and 2 from your list altogether, and adding items like this:

• Where do newcomers congregate?
  • Bring a list of beginner books. In addition to the Camel, highlight the Llama, and the Perl cookbook, for example. Think about adding "books you should avoid". (Personally, I don't want to go there. ;-)
  • Show them the monastery, and introduce them to etiquette of posting.
  • Show them newsgroups and #perlmonks.
  • Introduce them to davorg's NMS.
• Where do I go next?
  • Introduce them to CPAN and Perldoc.
  • Show them the next-level books, such as Effective Perl Programming, and the mod_perl book.
  • Introduce them to some "names". Who are TheDamian, Dominus, chip, gbarr, and DanSugalski¹? Heck, show them The Perl Cabal. ;-).
• Finally, talk about How to stay connected.
  • Introduce them to use perl.
  • Describe the ongoing Perl 6 work. Show them where to find the apocalypses and the exegeses.
  • Talk about TPC and YAPC: how much they cost, where they are this year, and so on.

¹Wish that one worked. ;-)

Think of yourself as conducting a tour of, say, ancient Egypt. Right now, you're doing a sightseeing tour for informed visitors. Don't try to turn them into Egyptologists yet, but just show the ruins and the digs. Then show them when American University in Cairo accepts applications!

Good luck in any case. This sounds very useful and fun.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.