Re: intro

I'm Peter Scott, I have a home-based business in the Pacific NorthWest 
doing telework on software development and enterprise architecture, I teach 
Perl (3 independent 1-day classes following on from on another) currently 
just for a large aerospace lab in California, and I'm working on a Perl book.

At 11:21 PM 10/29/99 +1000, [email protected] wrote:
>What platforms do you teach Perl on?

Unix and NT.

>Do you teach any third-party software with Perl?

No.

>What do you find hardest to teach about Perl?

I'm having a hard time with hashes for beginners.  In my early classes this 
wasn't the case, but the attendees at that time were the early adopters who 
all had significant programming experience in other languages.  Now I get 
people who've never edited a plain text file, let alone written a 
program.  This despite the fact that the only prerequisite for the 
beginners' class is that they have written a program in any language.  But 
I've also had people who professed expertise in C++ who had a hard time 
with hashes.

>Do you use analogies and metaphors,

Of course...

>  anthropomorphisation, puppet shows?

I have conducted various tricks with labelled balls in my beginners' class 
to illustrate the primitive data types, but I don't think it worked too 
well.  I'm going to try some slide animations next, basically showing the 
effect on a graphical representation of an array, hash, etc, from walking 
down some code.

>Do you get your trainees to evaluate your training?  What do you ask?

The evaluations are conducted on-line by the client.  I have no say in the 
questions, I just get to see the comments with attributions stripped.



--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies