> 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.
This is true; it's very easy to underestimate the difficulty/interest level of an "easy" exercise. > 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. Sounds cool, but also sounds like many students would struggle to implement something like this in a single course. And with an approach like this, what happens if the students can't implement a particular feature ? Presumably you give them some code, or they can't do the rest of the exercise ? > 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. Will do. However, I have been unimpressed with the quality of most of the free training material I have seen, so my expectations won't be high. > 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. Yes. I have seen these. > If you were to ask nicely I'm sure that I can provide you with a > snapshot of the revised exercises. :) Just to make things clear: I wasn't asking for a free donation of exercises as I now have a set of about 100 (mostly elementary) interesting-enough ones that I wrote myself (though if you want to make a donation, let's skip the exercises - cash will do fine :-). Rather I was suggesting that maybe it would be nice if others in years to come could avoid the pain I went through dreaming them up. I would be contributing those that I have written. Steve Collyer
