Re: Offering a helping hand

[Cubes]

This is a bit off-track from your question, but the single biggest obstacle I have encountered in similar situations is lack of motivation and/or time. Being charged with teaching a cow-orker something new, then finding out that your pupil isn't given any "work" time to use learning it and is not willing/able to do the footwork on their own time ends up enormously frustrating for everyone involved.

Before you get too far into this project, sit down with your would-be student, his manager, and your manager (all together, or separately depending on your brand of office politics). If you're both willing to tackle this as a personal project, above and beyond your normal duties, that's great -- just make sure you understand each other's limits (can he call/email you at home with questions? will you set up regular lunchtime or after-work meetings?) If not, be sure your respective managers understand that teaching and learning take time, and that will impact whatever else you each have on your plate. Be sure you get clear direction on priorities, accounting/billing for the time you spend on this, and what sort of status updates and/or results they expect to see.

About the only thing I can offer as a teaching suggestion is to try and get a feel for where your pupil is in his understanding of basic programming concepts. Make sure he's up to speed on data structures, algorithms (at least the idea of an algorithm and its relationship to code), program flow control, and some general OO stuff.

If he learned VB by rote, copying and pasting and twiddling here and there, you may need to step back to the fundamentals of being a programmer before getting into the details of being a perl programmer. You might even have him do some exercises in VB (if you know any VB) to assess and/or teach some of this. Once he's got those things firmly implanted in his head, the specifics of any new language will come much easier.