Re: Free online Perl Practice tests

[samizdat]

One of the hardest tasks of management (it seems to me) is learning to be an advocate for your group to get the resources it needs in the face of every other group's needs. If you can learn just one more management skill, let it be this one! :)

Start by getting approval for a set of Perl books to share and time to use them. I'd also be a smart guy and get your team to learn some management-friendly presentation or documentation tools that you can spiff up your group's output with, like doxygen or OO Presents (or Visio if you're stuck in Dozeville).

As for refreshing your coding skills, I heartily agree with the previous poster that doing some project coding is a far better refresher than any testing or rote-learning website. The challenge of coding is far more about solving the problem at hand than it is about knowledge of syntax and function calls.

At my current job I've dropped into a (large) nest of embedded C programmers, and I am somewhat embarrassed at how much better most of them are than I because I've never been a straight-line C programmer. Besides my day job coding, I've found that coding a C extension library to be open sourced is highly rewarding both in terms of my own happiness at making a contribution and as a different perspective on the use of the language. The same can apply to Perl and CPAN.

Finally, let me agree that managing coders is nothing to be ashamed of!