I've been making CBT for quite a while and I still look back with some fondness at that time. But anyway... of course it's a piece of cake to build good CBT with HTML and Perl (throw in some MySQL). I just wished I had Perl and HTML (and MySQL) 16 years ago... It would have been so much easier.

But please don't make the same mistake as CBT-developers of all times made. It's not the tools with or the media on which the CBT is made. It's always about the content. And of course the way you present the content is important, but not as important as the content itself. Good written text, presented in small enough parts so the reader won't get frustrated. Good questions, good answers, good record keeping, low reaction times.

Good CBT can be made with MS-DOS batch files, bad CBT can be made with the most modern and best content management systems (which tend to be horribly slow). Many many books have been written and, as it seems, seldomly read.

As to your suggestion to write CBT which contains something for judging Perl scripts: that's closer to Artificial Intelligence than to CBT. Debuggers can do a lot nowadays, but not checking for something to have a desired outcome.

I've seen the prices paid for CBT these days and I think they're ridiculously low. No fun or honour in there any more. I guess I'll stick to writing and consulting and maybe some more programming.

There are a lot of reasons why there are so small amounts of good CBT and why CBT is not used much more. The same with good websites. Lots of people think it just comes in for free, and don't want to pay for it.

Update: corrected spelling mistakes (again)(2x) and added a sentence at the end.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.