Hi All, I'm about to send this document out to some local schools I've made contact with. I was hoping I could get a little feedback on the content before it the first one goes out (later today). After all, as you already know my unglish eint grate :)
Software Programming A local programming group is offering schools and colleges, a free evening software programming course for their students. Details of which follow:- What is software programming? It is the art of designing and writing computer programs, such as games, desktop applications and internet services. All the programs you see and use on your computer have been designed and coded by a programmer or team of programmers. What is Perl? Perl is a programming language. There are lots of different programming languages, some suited to making specific pieces of software, others can be applied to a broad range of applications. A programming language is designed to be human readable and writeable, it gets translated into the ones and naughts of machine code by a compiler. Perl is what's known as a high level language, meaning it's far away from coding in ones and naughts. Why is Perl a good first language? Perl borrows syntax and ways of doing things from older, lower level languages such as C, C++, Pascal and LISP. It has also greatly influenced newer languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby and JavaScript. This makes Perl an excellent entrance point into programming. Learning Perl makes it much easier to learn other languages in the future. Although many people find Perl is the only programming language they need. Some Perl examples The popular network game Frozen Bubble is made in Perl. http://www.frozen-bubble.org/ The most popular spam filtering software for internet servers is coded in Perl. http://spamassassin.apache.org/ The webs most popular film and movie site is powered by Perl http://www.imdb.com/ Jobs as programmers Programming isn't easy, it requires a lot of practice and skill. Employers seeking software developers most often test a programmers ability to write code and solve problems. Practical skills and experience are commonly valued more than computing qualifications. For many programming languages, such as Perl, there is no official certification. What does the course provide? The course teaches the basics of computer programming. How to create small programs in Perl that read input from the user and save things to disk. Most importantly, the course aims to show students how they can teach themselves further programming skills. How much do courses like this usually cost? Typical beginning Perl programming courses are 5 days long at a cost of around £2,000 per student. A google for "Perl programming course" brings up examples. Why is this course offered for free? Perl itself is open source and free to download. It's not a commercial product like Microsoft Windows. The local Perl moungers group wants to promote Perl as a programming language and bring new blood to the language. After all the beginners of today are the gurus of tomorrow. The course is only available to teenagers (ages 13 to 19). Considering the usually high cost of attending such a course, we hope this kind of scheme will be picked up all around the country. Giving students of all financial backgrounds the chance to catch the programming bug. Who are Perl Moungers? Perl moungers are social groups of Perl programmers. The local group is Bristol and Bath Perl Moungers ran by Lyle Hopkins. They hold regular meetings with conversations orientated around programming in general. Their web site can be found at http://perl.bristolbath.org Who is Lyle? Lyle is a self employed computer programmer, who has been developing Perl based internet applications for 10 years. He is the current Managing Director of Cosmic Networks Ltd, a software development company. He has a current enhanced disclosure CRB check. Lyle _______________________________________________ BristolBathPM mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.bristolbath.org/mailman/listinfo/bristolbathpm
