Course:
Programming in Perl Series
DigitalThink
http://www.digitalthink.com/catalog/series/se019.html
Summary:
Review:
I am a technical writer who maintains an on-line library for a telecommunications company. Increasingly I've been asked make my web pages "do stuff," and Perl CGI came highly recommended by the folks I work with. Due to budget restrictions (yeah, we all know what's happened to tech stock) the Perl course I signed up for was an online course called Programming in Perl Series, put out by DigitalThink (see URL at the top of this review).
Programming in Perl is divided into two classes- Introduction to Perl 5 and Advanced Perl for the Web. The first class presents some of the basic concepts used in Perl- data types, operators, functions, and regular expressions. Modules are not covered. The second class, Advanced Perl for the web, covers basic CGI programming, state machines, and some more advanced data type concepts (notice: modules are not covered here either).
As a complete newcomer to Perl, I found Introduction to Perl 5 useful. Aside from a couple of typos (which I'm sure no one but an anal editor type will notice) it is informative, the lessons flow cleanly, knowledge building logically as the course progresses. Happily, the exercises aren't simply reiterations of examples used in the lessons. After completing the exercises, a "tutor" looks at them and makes suggestions, which I found fairly helpful. If you have any knowledge of Perl, this class is likely too simple to be of use, but it is okay for a newbie.
If your company's paying for it, it's an okay introduction to Perl.
Advanced Perl for the Web, on the other hand, is the main reason I was inspired to write this review. Sometime in the late 13th century someone wrote the class material and it has not been updated since. Most of the sample code is incompatible with web servers using Perl 5.005_03 or higher. To a novice Perl programmer, this proved nightmarishly frustrating (what's wrong with my code?! It looks like it should work! Ahhhh!!). The "tutors" suddenly became illusive and useless and I had to beg the help of the Perl folk at my office.
I went over the sample code (as in, code theoretically provided to show us naive students how to do things right) with experienced Perl programmers and discovered that not only is the code older than dirt, it's full of such blasphemies as: homemade query parsing code; absence of 'use strict'; undeclared global variables; lines which, when removed, do not change the behavior of the program; assumptions about the behavior of the student's web server that are, of course, based on a web server older than dirt. The CGI module is not introduced at any time. My Perl friends gasped in horror and indignation. And then they taught me the right way of doing it (ah- use CGI- now isn't that better?).
In a short amount of time, I managed to learn bad habits effectively by carefully performing the exercises provided in Advanced Perl for the Web. If you would like to learn bad habits too, I recommend this course.
Novice Perl programmers should not be subjected to the wrong ways of programming before they are exposed to the right ways. Do not pay money for Advanced Perl for the Web.
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