I don't teach Perl, but I'd like to add something here from the other side
of the tracks if I may. At TPC this year, Larry said something very
interesting thay may have been missed, that sometimes you gotta fake
something before you actually are good at or know something. This is an
important point for teachers as we seem to lose sight that facts and data
are not knowledge.
I guess what I'm getting at is that there are lots of books out there and
courses, etc but I haven't seen one that eschews the details, the corny
trite examples, etc. for a solid hands-on get involved approach. I had C
before I started to use Perl, but I started because I had a problem to
solve, not because I really had time to kill learning a new esoteric
language and I learned by stealing other peoples code off the net. Perl
isn't hard, it's just all the stuff that most books and teachers throw at
students at the outset is discouraging. No offense to teachers present,
but I stopped going to the tutorials at TPC as for the most part, 5-8
hours of someone going on about Perl without using reality as a setting is
positively soporific and you can always read the handouts later. On the
other hand, I might manage to stay awake for a few hours of 'building a
DBI driven web site from scratch' or 'steal this code! how to obtain and
recognise good Perl code to use for your own evil desires'.
As an exercise for myself since I don't know CGI terribly well, I began
building a Perl mailing list website and my goal was to steal as much code
from the net to do it since I had consumed an awful amount of time
collecting the data itself. I looked at Perl, PHP and Python, everyone but
Perl has some sort of 'web site builder' thing out there of vastly varying
quality. The PHP results looked great, but too much hassle to install and
overhead, the Catalog Perl module was cool, but the admin interface was
clunky and far more snazzy than what I wanted. All I wanted was a simple
CGI that would extract data from a mysql database and present it on a
page. I finally snagged the examples from the Perl DBI book and found one
that I could hack for my own evil purposes. While this isn't rocket
science, I can understand how frustrated and discouraged people who just
want to do something quick and simple without having to slog through
several books or classes just to make a simple little web page. 10 little
lines of code. I love Perl for this and think too many have been driven
away by the 'Perl is hard' mantra as people start to believe it after a
while.
I realise that there are many who even the most explicit documentation
cannot help, but I'd like to think too that Perl could be made a lot more
accessible if only it were presented differently. Perhaps I'm an optimist,
but I did manage after 5 or 6 email of saying the same thing different
ways to explain to a guy why stable.zip was not, in fact, missing an .exe
:)
e.
