I liked merlyn's suggestion of teaching from the Llama book. But I had a thought on how you might condense.

You mentioned that your target audience already have experience with C++. Take the philosophy of leading a horse (or budding Camels) to water, rather than trying to force him to drink. Rather than attempting to teach Perl in a day, teach those parts of Perl that are easy to see as advantageous strengths over, say, C++. If they're thirsty, they'll start with that kind of an introduction and run with it.

For example, while teaching out of Llama, specifically go over topics such as hashes, lists/arrays, regexps, go heavy on DWIM'ery, file operations, including specifying alternate input record separators, show a trick or two with split, a trick or two with map. Dynamically create code and eval it. Delve a little into references and data-structures. Use that to lead into doing a Schwartzian Transform with short-circuit fallthrough to demonstrate how to sort on multiple criteria... those are just a few thoughts.

I guess what I'm saying is that you probably can't teach Perl in a day, but you can teach why this group should invest the personal time required to learn it. Stress quick development time, rich syntax, extreme flexibility, etc. Even stress extensibility; the fact that Perl can incorporate C/C++ in its code, and the fact that C/C++ code can embed Perl. And by all means, show off CPAN. You have a good opportunity, in that you're talking to already reasonably coherent programmers. You will be most successful in turning a few of them into Perl programmers if you devote your time to showing what is in store for those who grab the torch and run with it.


Dave

In reply to Re: Requesting suggestions for one day Perl course by davido
in thread Requesting suggestions for one day Perl course by talexb

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.