The Free Love-, er, Teach-In

[Joel Bernstein]

On Mon, Mar 12, 2007 at 12:26:28PM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
> Well, yes. Actually in conversation on Thursday we came up with about  
> four subtly different courses - all of which could be useful to  
> different groups of people.
> 
> The question is really which one would be the best one to choose for  
> the first free course that we give.

The one which has the most potential to improve intermediate
programmers. I believe the bar was set at "must understand objects and
references", which seems reasonable.

I'd love to see the more advanced stuff taught at a later date, but is
it feasible to get 'intermediates' (and relatively low-level ones, by
the sound of that) to the level of understanding symbol-table
manipulation, globjects, etc in a day?

> Personally, I'm leaning towards something that is largely "Advanced  
> Perl Programming" with large side orders of "Perl Best Practices",  
> "Mastering Perl" and "The Pragmatic Programmer".
> 
> Might be a bit much for a one day course tho' :-/

Sounds a bit heavy for the target audience. Maybe if this goes well and
you still want to take part in teaching that one, we can try for another
LPW or something? A day of useful techniques and wizardly tricks would
be quite fun, I think.

A little of that stuff ought to go into the intermediate -> advanced
training, definitely. You want to show some of the power of Perl as well
as teaching the standard best practices (which I do agree should be
covered). 

The real problem, which you directly alluded to, is that
there is far more to teach people, in order to bring them up to the
standard we really want potential hires to be reaching, than can be
taught in a day. 

I quite like the idea of starting at the acceptable LCD and working
upwards, in theory at least you ought to get more and more people coming
along as the course advances (if it's successful and people are prepared
to give up their time and keep putting together trainings). I'm not sure
what dates are being considered for the first event but I'd consider
putting together a proposal for a talk once the parameters are defined.

I'm curious what would be required to make this a repeatable series of
events. Apart from a lot of peoples' time, I mean. Would the venue allow
a regular (fsvo) training?

/joel