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

James Peregrino <[email protected]> writes:

> 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.

I've taught two tutorials in that vein ("Perl for System
Administration", and "Perl Saves the Day: Getting out of Large
Sysadmin Pinches with Small Perl Programs").  The former (based on the
book) is less pragmatic than the second. Neither had small enough
audiences to be hands-on.

Given the vast range of tasks a sysadmin does/will have to do, my
approach was one of "give people tools, they'll figure out what to do
with them." So for instance, I'm happy to teach how to use SNMP from
Perl without diving too into "How to find an entry in a Cisco 5500's
dynamic cam table."

For "Perl Saves the Day" I strung together a series of real-life
situations and worked over the tools I wrote/borrowed to deal with
them. In the process I teased out the abstract concepts that could be
used to apply to other people's situations. 

That being said, I've also be staying up nights thinking about how to
create a good learning environment for my university (my day
job). Part of the answer, which I think goes directly to your
question, is the use of sandboxes. I've been exploring what could be
done using projects/products like VMware (server version),
user-mode-linux, and Ensim's stuff. I haven't thought directly about
how they could be used for a hands-on situation, but I think that
would be a blast to design. I do plan to use them more in my non-hands
on teaching.

> My head spins at the thought of creating non-web pragmatic Win32 GUI
> examples.

Well, GUI frontends to sysadmin stuff (e.g. an SNMP query tool) should
be good fodder.

   Peace,
      dNb