you always see whinging about how perl is never taught in most 4 year colleges whereas community colleges and extension schools teach it often. below is a description of a perl class at tufts university (near boston).
uri from Dr. Alva L. Couch Associate Professor of Computer Science, Tufts University (note: he was the program chair for LISA 2002 and he likes perl) The course is called "Perl Programming Practicum" (150PPP). See http://www.eecs.tufts.edu/g/150PPP for everything concerning it. It uses "Programming Perl" as its only textbook. While most 4-year colleges frown on language courses, students desperately desire them. I *thought* this was going to be a relatively small "seminar" class of 35 students. I was very surprised when seniors in their first round of registration reported that all 35 slots had filled up with graduate students! This is just about our *entire* graduate student body! As a result of lots of student advocacy and pressure, I expanded the course to 65 students and located a larger room. In the end, I let in 74 students and teach the course in one of the larger lecture halls in the University. Students range from post-quals Ph.D. candidates to a small number of intrepid juniors. The basic concept behind the course is to offer "a graduate course in programming methodology". The "official" prerequisite for the course is Data Structures. However, students attending the course report that this is a lie, and that the actual material that I cover requires some understanding of Programming Languages, Algorithms, Computation Theory, and Operating Systems. I take a rather broad view of Perl's interaction with Everything In the Universe, so this is probably more accurate than the real prerequisite. -- Uri Guttman ------ [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------- http://www.stemsystems.com --Perl Consulting, Stem Development, Systems Architecture, Design and Coding- Search or Offer Perl Jobs ---------------------------- http://jobs.perl.org
