I would suggest that the teacher go right to perl's true strength, which is text processing. There is a tremendous amount of text at Project Gutenberg, so that part is taken care of. Download text and analyze it.

First, get through "Hello, World," Then, explain this program, using a chunk of Moby Dick as input:

while(<>)
{
  if (/Ahab/)
  {
    print $_;
  }
}
[download]

Introduce scalars, arrays, and hashes, all as ways to enhance the analysis of text.

Have the one of the more advanced students show the others how to turn a program into a CGI. Then have another advanced student explain the concept of taint. No one will understand it, but it will be impressive and give the student a reputation as an uber-hacker.

To finish off the semester, introduce the concept of modules and show off fuzzy string matching with String::Approx.

If you have a truly gifted student in the class, ask him or her to write a program to answer certain simple questions about Moby Dick.

This course can work out very well. The trick is to show students how to make simple things simple. Web programming and databases are far more complex than the course needs to be. Just put perl to work on plain ASCII text, and let it roll.

I'll be teaching high school computing this year also, so I hope to see more posts about your friend's course. I plan on covering perl (just for text processing), MACSYMA (as a companion to second year algebra), and Octave (to crunch a few numbers and draw some graphs).

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

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