Sandor Strohmayer <[email protected]> wrote:
> Has anyone considered teaching a more in depth version of awk (gawk).
>
> At the end of my classes I hand out a more in depth tutorial of both sed and
> awk.
We include sed and awk in our curriculum of classes leading up to
LPIC-1. We also cover shell programming in much more depth than is
actually required for LPIC-1. Having said that, I would advise against
upgrading the coverage of these on the actual exams, because balance.
> We could also consider some perl scripting in 102. Perl is designed
> for administration and reporting. […] I believe a basic understanding
> of Bash scripting would provide students with a useful tool.
I agree about bash scripting – which already is on the LPIC-1 exam – but
adding Perl to LPIC-1 would be a terrible move. What should the weight
of the Perl objective be, and how much time, compared to other parts of
LPIC-1, would you expect to spend teaching people enough rudiments of
Perl to be dangerous? (Remember that commonly these are people who have
probably never used C, and who have had only a very casual and recent
introduction to the shell and shell tools, all of which are pretty much
a prerequisite to go anywhere with Perl, especially in a hurry.) Which
other parts of the exam would you downgrade to make room?
And this is before we get into the holy wars about how Perl is a
terrible language, unfit for human consumption, and how people should
really be using Ruby, or Python, or Tcl, or for that matter Awk, all of
which do roughly the same things as Perl, and all of which are terrible
languages in their own way. I've used Perl since 1989 or so, and taught
Perl classes to a large variety of people over the years, and my
observation is that Perl is not an especially easy language to learn,
especially if you have never programmed before – which is unfortunately
the case with many aspiring system administrators these days. (In the
1990s it was common for system administrators to know C and shell
programming, and in that context Perl makes a lot more intuitive sense
than if you don't have that background – and having just learned about
shell programming the day before does NOT give you that background.)
Incidentally, basic Perl used to be part of LPI-201, and it suffered
from exactly the same problems – minuscule weight in relation to the
rest of the exam content but potentially a huge time sink in classes,
and a very ill-defined scope of what people were actually expected to
know – that including it in LPIC-1 now would incur. It has been proven
to be a very bad idea, and should remain in its sealed coffin with a
stake driven very firmly through its heart.
Anselm
PS. Can you try not quoting the whole lpi-examdev digest when you're
posting a short message? Thank you.
Disclaimer: This is my own personal opinion and not that of my employer.
--
Anselm Lingnau ... Linup Front GmbH ... Linux-, Open-Source- & Netz-Schulungen
[email protected], +49(0)6151-9067-103, Fax -299, www.linupfront.de
Linup Front GmbH, Postfach 100121, 64201 Darmstadt, Germany
Sitz: Weiterstadt (AG Darmstadt, HRB7705), Geschäftsführer: Oliver Michel
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