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 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 ? The idea would be to provide a set of graded exercises that are suitable for beginning/ intermediate/advanced/whatever Perl programmers, maybe with solutions, maybe not, that anyone involved in Perl training could use. I see the following advantages: 1. the quality of Perl training generally may improve, if trainers do not have to spend a large amount of time thinking up exercises. 2. It would set a standard against which a student could evaluate a course; if an intermediate course fails to cover material deemed to be itermediate by the exercise set, then maybe there's a problem. OTOH, I see a big disadvantage: maybe noone would want to contribute their exercise ideas, as it would allow people to leech off their hard work in thinking them up; in short, maybe exercises represent too much investment in IPR to share. My POV is that the most important IPR in a training course resides in the quality of the course material, and the contents of the presenter's head, but maybe others will disagree. (and of course, there are other potential problems: who can contribute ? who decides the level of difficulty of a problem ? who hosts the set of problems ? etc) Anyone want to blow this idea out of the water ? Steve Collyer --------------------------------------------- Stephen Collyer Netspinner Ltd 01722 336125
