As a programmer of 20+ years thru Basic, COBOL, Fortran, C, REXX, C++, Java with smatterings of C-shell, Bourne shell, AWK, SED and more, & just 1 weeks aquaintance (all be it heavy hours and with real goals), I am finding this transition the worst ever. Maybe I'm just getting old.

I saw people advocating the PerlDocs........I cannot agree. I have so far found them far to terse, full of religious terminology (magical, autovivication, globbing etc.) and (as someone without much unix background) far to full of explainations that refer to (what I assume) are common, well-known Unix terminology, references and explaination-by-comparison with Unix concepts, to be of much value to me.

See Perl IO::Dir or IO::File (actually anything in the IO::* packages) for examples of this. Try and imagine these pages as explainations, if the Unix stuff isn't part of your experience set.

I suggest (and will be doing myself) getting the books first.

I then agree with most of what other people have been saying ...Set him writing *real* code ASAP and give him the time and space to experiment. Don't give too long a timescale for the first project up-front......no pressure means no incentive in my experience.