On Aug 18, 2008, at 7:31 AM, Gabor Szabo wrote:
As you - the trainers - encounter such people quite often I wonder
what do
you currently use during training? What do you recommend to your
students?
I recommend whatever they're familiar with.
In the open enrollment classes I teach, we run SuSE, so the W32 folks
occasionally don't know vi(1) or emacs(1).
So that we can focus on the language, not the tools or the IDE, I
tell them that kate(1) is notepad-like enough that they can get by.
That "tool talk" doesn't usually take more than 20 seconds. Since
kate(1) has color hilighting, I've got 90% of what I want from a
beginner's editor -- the ability to notice unbalanced quotes easily so
that they can focus on real syntax problems.
In 15+ years of teaching open enrollment and on-site classes, I can't
remember a *language* class (Perl, JavaScript, HTML, Shell, C...)
where the folks were returning to similar-enough environments and came
in with similar-enough gaps that teaching a *tool* or *IDE* would have
been more helpful than distracting.
Over the years I've considered getting "promo licenses" from some
language IDE's (ActiveState comes to mind) to distribute to students,
figuring that it would help the company and the students and also
"Perl, the technology/culture/community". Given the TMTOWTDI-ness of
the culture, I've never pursued it, always figuring that I can't pick
a *language* topic whose time budget I'd sacrafice for *tool* time.
Hope this helps...
Michael Wolf