Re: Perl texts for college class?

Uri Guttman writes:
 > >>>>> "WRW" == William R Ward <[email protected]> writes:
 > 
 >   WRW> That's fine, but students in a night school class cannot generally
 >   WRW> afford to buy a half dozen books at $30-50 each.  I need *one* book
 >   WRW> that has some of all of the above, and is written as a *textbook* not
 >   WRW> as a reference or teach-yourself book.
 > 
 > that is a valid point. so teach richer students! :-)
 > 
 > lanaguages like perl which are not borne of ivory towers but the
 > real world tend to get reference and how to books and not
 > textbooks. lisp has textbooks galore. you might still want to have a
 > decent set of perl books for use as a lending library for your
 > students. they can then buy which ones they like if they want more depth
 > in those areas. having a preselected set of decent books will keep them
 > out of the dummies section of amazon. 

Well since this is an actual college, they have an actual library.
But they don't have every Perl book that's been mentioned here, I
think, so I may have to ask them to build up their Perl selection.

 > and orwant's interactive course sounds like more of what you want. and
 > so does perl, the programmer's companion. you should get a set of books
 > for yourself to see which fits you course the best. it may be 2 books
 > like the nutshell as a reference and orwant's as a main text. also
 > printing the perl docs (not all of them, but selected man pages) would
 > be a good reference and probably cheaper than books if your school has a
 > printing office. also no copyright issues unlike xeroxing a book.

That's a good point.  POD's are freely copyable?  Then maybe I can put
together something that has most of the reference value from the
Camel, but without the price tag.

 > you always need something as a full language reference so make sure the
 > are taught how to use the perl docs and FAQ's. if they learn how to
 > search and find stuff there, half their problems will be solved.

Sure - I suggest the Camel and the Cookbook as references, and have
been using the LLama thus far as a text, with lecture to fill in the
missing parts.  I may use Effective Perl Programming as a text for the
second half of the course.  I haven't seen Orwant's book or the
Companion yet, so that's something to check out.

--Bill.

-- 
William R Ward        [email protected]      http://www.bayview.com/~hermit/
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