I've read this book hoping to use it
my teaching but was confess I was disappointed.
While it does
cover some of the topics a beginning
applications programmer
needs (specification, documentation, etc),
and while it does cover perl, (arrays, hashes, etc),
in my opinion it does not do well at introducing
many of the fundamental notions of programming
and computer science - dealing with complexity,
fundamental algorithms, and so on. Once you're past
the "how to think like an applications engineer"
opening, the book walks through the features
of the perl language much as Learning Perl
or many of the other Perl books.
At least for my purposes, teaching an introduction
to computer science as a discipline within the
liberal arts, this book didn't really do the trick.
