Re: Simon Cozens' book

Rich Bowen, in an immanent manifestation of deity, wrote:
>Steven Lembark wrote:
>> 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.

When I wrote my Perl Course, I tried to break up the different datatypes
with code structure so that people could write programs immediately even
if they were rather trivial.

So, the order my course materials and the course itself was in:
 1. Scalars
 2. Comparison and Truth
 3. Arrays
 4. Loops
 5. Hashes
 6. Subroutines
 7. Introduction to File I/O
 8. Regexes
 9. References
10. Packages and Objects
11. Standard Libraries
12. CGI      (why many of the people were there)
13. Cleanup  (a session but not a chapter)

It was interesting because the course was billed as a
  "Complete overview of basic Perl.  You will know how to write full
   Perl programs coming out of this course."
Yet many of the people just wanted to play with and modify CGI scripts
rather than become Perl Programmers...

There was a requirement for knowing -some- programming language.  The
wide variety of languages was interesting.  COBOL to Excel Macro
language to C to Haskell...

Darren
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Darren Stalder/2608 Second Ave, @282/Seattle, WA 98121-1212/USA/+1-206-ELF-LIPZ
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