By teaching the reader how to program, I mean that I will be teaching the basics. If I ge too ambitious in what I want to show them, the book will be much too large and intimidating. mathra made an excellent point about the size of the book. I plan for it to contain ~300 pages (including examples and exercises).

I will be demonstrating structured programming and will stress the importance of logic in programming. In fact, I have a section called "The Logic of Truth".

I won't get into vectors or recursions. Let them learn the basics and then graduate to one of the other fine books out there for more meat.

btw.. I found it difficult to describe (in writing) what a scalar is to a novice. I simply stuck with stating (paraphrasing) that it's the basic data type in Perl and gave some examples.

Mick