The Free Love-, er, Teach-In

[michael]

On Mon, 12 Mar 2007, Ovid <publiustemp-londonpm at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Turning scripters into programmers and journeyman programmers into
>> star engineers.
>
> Agreed, but volunteering Dave to teach two classes isn't necessarily
> fair.  Further, I certainly don't know that our proposed venue is going
> to agree to that, either.
>
> If we want to start offering free Perl training to a variety of
> different levels of programmers, that's a different kettle of camels
> altogether.  Frankly, I think it would be fantastic, but perhaps a wee
> bit ambitious prior to the first class.

I'll stick my neck out a bit here

Competent Perl programmers are already quite well catered for in terms of 
low cost|free training, Perl workshops, YAPCs, Perlmongers tech meets and 
written resources like Perl Best Practices, perl monks, other O'Reilly 
books etc.

Novice scripters probably don't even know these resources exist and 
certainally don't have the understanding to exploit them.

If you have the choice of an advanced or beginners course, I'd suggest 
that spending half an hour teaching 20 newbys to:-

* use strict 
* use warnings
* how to write useful code commnets.
* how not to get shouted at on online forums

Would be far far easyer and perhaps do more 'good' than
teaching 20 competent programmers the finer points of OO design.

I'd also question if it is possible to convert competent Perl
programmers into top-notch programmers in one day.

If the teach ins took off and you could offer 5 days spread over 5 months 
with homework assignments (both individual and group) and a course support 
mailing list.  I think that would do the trick.

Finally I can make a offer,  I'd like to attend an advanced teach in, 
I'd love to _tutor_ on a beginners one.

--
Michael
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Michael John Lush PhD			Tel:44-20-7679-5027
Nomenclature Bioinformatician		Fax:44-20-7387-3496
HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee	Email:  nome at galton.ucl.ac.uk
The Galton Laboratory
University College London, UK
URL: http://www.gene.ucl.ac.uk/nomenclature/
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