G'day Stephen and fellow trainers, On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 10:00:04PM +0100, Stephen Collyer wrote: > One of the problems I had when writing a Perl > training course was that of coming up with a > decent set of exercises, particularly ones that > are not too trivial or too difficult, and also > ones that are not too boring.
In my experience, what are "boring" exercises to someone who knows the material is almost always interesting to someone who's just learnt it a few minutes ago. Read in a line of numbers entered by the user and sort them in ascending order? Sounds boring, but to someone who's just discovered sort, split and reverse, it's quite a challenge. Having said that, both myself and attendees enjoy exercises that slowly build up to something. In my Object Oriented Perl classes, a lot of the examples are based around chess-pieces. As the sessions continue, attendees build more and more into their code and learn about inheritance, polymorphism, redispatch, and many other topics along the way. By the end of it, they have an (almost, no castling or en pasant) fully working chess client which they can use to play against their friends. > In view of this, I was wondering if anyone would > be interested in contributing to an openly > available set of exercises that any Perl trainer > could have access to ? Believe it or not, freely available Perl exercises already exist. When Netizen shut down a few years back, Skud had the foresight to throw all of her Perl training notes and exercises up on SourceForge. Look up the project "spork" and you should find four courses as they were when Netizen folded. The Perl Training Australia notes (available for PDF download at http://perltraining.com.au/notes.html) are based upon the Netizen ones, with lots of changes for Perl 5.6.1, new material, on so on. Our exercises are also based upon the ones from Spork, but again muchly updated and revised. If you were to ask nicely I'm sure that I can provide you with a snapshot of the revised exercises. :) All the best, Paul -- Paul Fenwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://perltraining.com.au/ Director of Training | Ph: +61 3 9354 6001 Perl Training Australia | Fax: +61 3 9354 2681
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