Clearly you are trolling, but what the hell...
it is unthinkable to me that someone needs to take a course to learn some language. Why cannot you just read the mannual?
I used to think like this too. Indeed, there is quite an ego boost associated with mastering a subject by merely reading up on it.
A few months ago, I was talking with my favorite professor (for whom I have the utmost respect) about our respective research. I admitted to him that I tried reading one of his papers, but that it all went over my head.
I was surprised when he told me that, for the most part, he never bothers reading papers anymore. The papers in the literature are generally written so that someone who already knows the material can verify its correctness, but someone new to the material cannot always gain a firm understanding. So if there is some new research he wants to know about, he flies out to the see the people doing the research and spends a few days with them to find out what he wants to know. He couldn't understand the stubbornness of some of his colleagues in his own building, who try to gain understanding of his complicated research from the papers alone, and with too much pride to ever walk down the hallway to talk to him about it.
Bottom line: There's no shame in learning something in a two-way channel. It's a pretty smart way to do it.
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I down voted you
And then you posted anonymously. It's unthinkable to me that some people dont have the courage to put their name to a criticism.
I dont think it's unreasonable though that the OP would want to take a course to learn a language - maybe he wants to learn how to do things the right way from the start rather than fumbling his way along. Maybe he wants a good solid grounding and introduction to what Perl can do and how it can be done, before he then takes that learned knowledge and goes and looks at perldoc and hums along from there.
Sure, it might not be the cheapest way, but we dont all learn in the same manner...
Good luck to max-bklyn - welcome to the world of Perl.
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And, there are many different learning styles -- some people learn best from examples, some people need pictures, and some people do best when things are explained orally.
Once in a while, you need to get up to speed very quickly, and taking a class doesn't give you as much of an opportunity to procrastinate. You also have someone there to ask questions if you get confused (and face to face communication is much more effective than posting on a message board)
I think it's admirable to try to further your knowledge -- it's even better if you can manage to get your work to foot the bill for it.
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