Steven Lembark wrote:
>
> >
> > Chapter 1: First Steps In Perl
> > Chapter 2: Working with Simple Values
> > Chapter 3: Lists and Hashes
> > Chapter 4: Loops and Decisions
> > Chapter 5: Regular Expressions
> > Chapter 6: Files and Data
> > Chapter 7: References
> > Chapter 8: Subroutines
> > Chapter 9: Running and Debugging Perl
> > Chapter 10: Modules
> > Chapter 11: Object-Oriented Perl
> > Chapter 12: Introduction to CGI
> > Chapter 13: Perl and Databases
> > Chapter 14: The World of Perl
>
> q: how did you pick the order? obviously, people need to
> understand scalars before other things. the issue usually
> comes up w/ regexen, references, subs & debugging -- with
> each side *convinced* that no other way will do :-)
I feel like the progression is very natural - at least for the first 10
chapters, which is all that I really have time for in the class format
I'm doing.
I really want to talk about Modules, because that's what I think is
useful. But you have to know about subroutines first. But you have to
know about blocks, which are most reasonably introduced by loops. But
you have to know about lists, in order to do loops very well. But you
have to know about scalars first. And there's the first 10 chapters. The
placement of regex is somewhat arbitrary, but they are very useful when
doing lookps and decisions, so coming after that works very well. Files
are very handy if you want to have a useful example for regex. And there
you go.
I've found using other books that I tend to jump around a little bit,
because you hvae to have x to teach y, and those chapters were in the
"wrong order." I don't know that this is necessarily a "correct order"
thing, just that I have a particular way of presenting concepts, and
it's very hard for me to find a good way to talk about y if you don't
already understand x. That is, I believe that this is a teaching issue,
not necessarily a learning issue. You can assemble the building blocks
in a variety of ways.
Chapters 11-14 are "extra topics" and can be thrown in at any time,
IMHO.
--
Rich Bowen -- Director of Web Application Development
http://www.cre8tivegroup.com/ -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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