Re: What are the most basic, generic aspects of programming?

[Wassercrats]

How many hours of instruction will you be giving? Are the student's needs specialized? Maybe you shouldn't teach them what you would teach a typical Perl student.

It's not accurate to say "Once you've learned these five basics, you can write complete programs on your own!" You don't need to know all that to write a complete program, but you do need to know several functions, which you don't mention.

[theAcolyte]

Good questions!

How many hours is up for grabs. Its an open ended contract paying me per class. Kinda gotta like that :)

I suppose its geared towards perl in a CGI environment as its a client I did a quite extensive CMS for about 5 years ago. They want to be able to do minor mods in house or change things without having to go to me. While I don't like slicing my own throat if I don't teach them someone else will.

To me, those 5 basics are needed to write any useful CGI type program. I'm really asking if I'm missing anything. And yes the ! statement at the end is a little overboard but I'm going to try to calm the fears that this stuff might be too hard for them.

I've always thought teaching is a little bit like programming ... break it down into small enough bits and you can do it without a problem - Erik

[davidj]

I suppose its geared towards perl in a CGI environment

I would suggest that you include the issue of security on that first slide. While it is not strictly a programming topic in the manner that the other topics you have are, hopefully it will give you the opportunity right from the start to emphasize that security is a serious matter. As I'm sure you well know, too many sites/web businesses have been torpedoed because security was an afterthought.

davidj

[Wassercrats]

None of them have ever done programming of any sort...They want to be able to do minor mods in house or change things without having to go to me.

I hope you're sure you were really asked to teach them Perl, and I hope whoever's hiring you for this knows what he's doing, and that after a week's worth of lessons, the boss doesn't come to you and say something like "Did you teach them how to change the font color yet? That's mainly what I wanted."

[theAcolyte]

LOL ... yes, yes, yes. This isn't even an issue. The 'class' is already at least competent in basic HTML. The site has a very complex CMS back end that was custom written for them ... they want to be able to modify -THAT-.

[qq]

I agree with wassercrats, you need to be careful that you understand everyone's expectations. It takes quite a while to learn to program, and even making a minor change to a script assumes you can read it and know what's minor.

If you really want to teach them to program, everyone should get a standard text - merlyn's Learning Perl - and all go through it together.

qq