Joe - If you answer the questions I suggested I'll offer more concrete advice. A lot of people design curricula professionally and even they have trouble creating something effective for an unknown audience without specific goals. That's why we structured the Squidwrench event as "get together and help one another" instead of "we're going to teach you Android programming". Assuming there is enough interest around in a study group for this, you have a good idea. You will never be effective with it if you don't start nailing down your requirements, though. If you start teaching people who already have some amount of programming skill about control structures, you're going to waste everyone's time and lose a lot of interest. On the other hand, an absolute n00b won't get anywhere without control structures, so that should be on your list of things to consider.
Here's a list of what I consider to be absolutely essential: 1) control structures if-then, while, and for are most essential. 2) data structures arrays (or vectors), lists, and trees (stacks and heaps are nice, too) 3) paradigm If you're focusing on OO make sure you understand inheritance, encapsulation, and polymorphism. One could touch on API design here but it's probably better to come back to API design once you're more proficient with programming in general and your language of choice in particular. Like a curriculum, it is impossible to design a good API for an audience you know nothing about. If you're trying to learn Haskell, OO concepts are a waste of time. 4) tool chain This is the most important item on this list if you intend to write your own sw from scratch. This is the least important item on the list if you're looking for a job on a development team that has dedicated build staff. If that's not enough to think about in organizing something like what you want, then please rephrase your question. And at the risk of sounding redundant: Find out who would be participating and what they want to accomplish. It will make your planning process much, much easier. /thor ps - If your study group, regardless of skill level and goals, does not including actually writing real code and watching it run, you've made a terrible mistake. Unless this is a purely academic exercise and your goal is only to improve your classes vocabulary.
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