Or maybe you had a good trainer. It's certainly not impossible to give a good course - the material is just a bad child of a learning and a reference book, resulting in something that isn't good in either. And the material is far better that the horrible Perl courses they came up with (but not as bad as the Perl material from HP education - with that material you can play the game "open a page, try to find anything on the page that is actually correct" - a surprisingly difficult game). But I disgress.