> I'm suggesting that perhaps a ruthlessly
>pragmatic approach might be worthy of consideration.
I agree with Elaine.
It think "ruthless" is the key word here. My course attempts, in its
homework assignments, to be as pragmatic as possible. However I
haven't taken a "ruthless" approach, which I'll attempt to do now.
I came to Elaine's conclusion years ago partly from suffering trying
to learn OOP from useless examples that taught the mechanics of OO
correctly, but didn't leave me feeling I could do anything with it
when I tried solving my own real-world problems.
>From what I can tell via statistics I keep, that CGI, LWP, Net and DBI are
>far and away the most sought after modules
Yehaw! I cover all those. I feel emotionally validated!
> People want to build web sites not
>necessarily become fluent in Perl programming and that's not such a crime.
It is easier to come up with pragmatic examples in a web course. I
sometimes lay awake wondering how one would teach a Perl sys admin
course using pragmatic examples that wouldn't render the course
server inoperable.
My head spins at the thought of creating non-web pragmatic Win32 GUI examples.
A general purpose book like Learning Perl has a difficult task to be
all things to all people. Maybe a strict alternating between web and
non-web examples might work.
>And Randal, after scanning your article index, I see lots of graphics
>stuff including a catalog for photos, but nothing in the basic DBI/CGI
>category.
didn't Randal write a DBI article in TPJ? Anyway, Randal's stuff is
written for different audiences depending on the magazine/book.
What's also neat is that his archive is history of how Perl has been
taught through the ages.
-- James Peregrino - http://lab.dce.harvard.edu/~peregrin/business-card.html
