Re: learning programming in one day

-- Danny Faught <[email protected]>

> I have an opportunity to propose a one-day conference tutorial on the
> basics of programming (very likely using Perl as a basis).  Am I nuts for
> trying this?

It has been done before, and can work.

> The audience will be software testing professionals, with a good level of
> computer literacy, but probably little or no programming experience.
> There is a general desire among many testers to learn how to program so
> they can automate their tests.  I can't hope to make them programming
> wizards by the end of one day.  I'm thinking I could introduce them to
> the basics so they'd be more motivated and able to learn more from a book
> or a longer course.

You can give them an idea of what tools are available
and places to look for examples. The Benchmark module
might be a good example, if they are testers then an
example of implementing the "make test" logic in a
distro might also be good. Test::Simple can be used for
all sorts of things...

> Alternately, I could specify that participants already know at least one
> programming language, and I could focus on teaching Perl.  I already do a
> tutorial that does this to some extent, though I currently focus more on
> testing techniques than systematically teaching Perl.

You can specify that they are martians of blue descent,
but people who can "program html" will show up anyway.
Only thing you can really do is suggest that the people
already know how to program and offer some brush-up
material on the web (e.g., tpj archives, perl.com,
llama book and Hall's Effective Perl). If they really
don't know about programming maybe Johnson's Elements of
Programming With Perl would be a good advance read.

> Any feedback on this before I put together a proposal?

Perl is a wonderful glue language, which makes it nice
for QA, testing, and benchmarking. There are lots of
examples in this area from modules on CPAN, so the idea
seems workable.


--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                       Chicago, IL 60647
                                            +1 888 359 3508