Pragmatic Examples (was Re: Simon Cozens' book, distantly)

> 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