Alternative sources of Perl programmers

[Uri Guttman]

On 05/15/2013 12:06 PM, AJ Dhaliwal wrote:
> Damian (and Dave cross) disagree with you on that one. A week with them
> is worth more than a year's actual experience.
>
> On 14/05/13 22:10, Uri Guttman wrote:
>> also even a week of training by damian (or dave cross) won't give
>> actual experience. the trainees might do better but still have a steep
>> learning curve in the real world.

real world experience can't be taught in a classroom. i know damian's 
courses well as i produced a bunch of them in boston. you can only use 
some of the things you learn in a given shop. house rules, idiot 
cow-orkers, bad code base and such all conspire to slow down the 
application of what you learn in classes. in classes you don't work with 
real code much, you don't have to work around existing code, etc. that 
is what real world teaches you.

as for training these days, o'reilly school of tech has a good set of 
online perl classes (written by peter scott). you have to code up 
problems in their sandbox to pass each test/level. they have online 
people to review and help you out. not saying this is better than a well 
taught class but it is another way to do it and they do it well. also 
being online, remote and self paced it has some advantages over a classroom.

the real problem is getting shops to PAY for any sort of training. i was 
producing damian classes successfully for 3 or so years. then the 
economy bottomed out (this was before the great recession) and training 
budgets dried up. they still haven't come back yet from what i have 
seen. i would love to pull together damian training and client 
sponsorship but that didn't work when i tried it.

uri