Re: Not-So-FAQ about learning Perl

[Falkkin]

This is complete vaporware at present, although it maybe won't be, starting tomorrow...

A friend's daughter, who is in her early teens, wants to learn how to program, so I had her download ActivePerl today and install it. Haven't gotten to any actual teaching yet, though. I was originally planning on teaching her mainly through e-mail, but it turns out that her mom wants to learn as well. So, I've decided the best way to do this, without repetition, is to simply write a Perl tutorial in HTML, and post it on the Web. Neither of my "students" has had any previous programming experience, so the tutorial will be written at a very basic level.

I guess all I can say for sure is that I'll keep you and the Monks other posted on my progress, if anyone is interested.

[ichimunki]

Please do keep us posted!

One half-baked notion I've had for younger, beginning programmers is that lessons could be written as POD or XML, then presented via a pager script. At appropriate points in the reading, the lesson would stop, and accept user input. The input would then be eval'ed for full effect. If there are errors, the pager script can assist in parsing the problem.

This way, learning the ins and outs of emacs (or vi or notepad or Komodo) can be saved until after the larger introduction to programming and Perl is done. Also, scripts can be partially prepared. The student doesn't need to spend time typing #!/usr/bin/perl (or even figuring out what the correct shebang is on their machine), it can be prefilled (so for the bits that are not integral to the lesson, this means that stray typos in those other areas will not interfere with learning progress). For students my daughter's age (8) I think not having to go through a lot of steps would keep them more focused during the learning process.

This type of interactivity was one of the things that made getting into BASIC on the old Apples and C-64s so easy. You typed your next line on the command line and it got put into your program in the appropriate spot. It was easy to LIST [start_line#-[end_line#]] your program.

[puck]

The fill in the blanks part is good. That is how some of the early assignments I did at Uni worked.

If the problem is "Write a program to print the integers from 0 to 9, modify this program":

#include <stdio.h>

main {
  int i;

  for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    /* You're code here */
  }
}

Okay, that's a really simple one, but you get the idea... I assume that the Comp Sci department at my old Uni (VUW) is the only one that does that...

Cheers!