A colleague recently asked if I could point him towards some Perl training courses in the UK. Unfortunately I don't know of any, but did suggest a couple of books that would mostly cover what he was after. He plans to buy them, but was still on the hunt for short(ish) Perl courses, that he could attend. He found two and sent me them:
I'm not adding clickable links as I don't feel comfortable promoting these courses.
While the majority of the course details seem fairly appropriate for an advance course, I'm a little disappointed by them trying to include everything but the kitchen sink. In my opinion, sections on Perl/Tk, XS and embedding the interpreter are specialist areas, and are likely to be only of mild interesting to many attendees. I've certainly not had any *need* to know those areas over the last 9 years, and I would be surprised if the demand for those courses would drop off if they weren't there. I would rather see advanced courses teach those units as extensions and give more time to Templating, Regular Expressions, Testing and Perl Best Practices, which they don't appear to cover at all.
However, the worst part of the course, and perhaps the most damning, is their desire to draw so much attention to h2xs. Perl module creation has moved on leaps and bounds with ExtUtils::ModuleMaker and Module::Starter, and the last thing we need is to find more distributions uploaded to CPAN depending on Test.pm with a test.pl in tow.
I'm tempted to sign up for one of the courses, and see how well they actually teach the subject. It would be interesting from a personal perspective to see how much effort it would be to actually do the same thing. I've never thought of myself as a trainer, but at least I would have some current knowledge, and could promote more of the Perl community than these courses would appear to do. If nothing else it would be interesting to see how teaching techniques used in the classroom differ from the presentation skills used at conferences.
Having looked at the course outlines, and have had several people ask for some beginner style talks/tutorials at Birmingham Perl Mongers, I think I can perhaps try my hand at a few introductory sessions. I don't think I'll ever be good enough to follow-up Dave's Teach-In for a midlands audience, but it might be useful to take them to other non-Perl events. The IET have previously asked and I'm keen to get OpenAdvantage to consider Perl in the list of sessions.
I know someone who went on a GB Direct Perl training course, he seemed to like it.
Two data points (from an internet kiosk somewhere in the heart of New Zealand):
1 - I've had such a good reaction to the teach-in that I'm contemplating taking it on a small UK tour next year. Birmingham would be an obvious stop.
The second course on your (short) list is run by Graham Ellis. I know Graham. He's taken a couple of my courses in the past (you might have met him on the Med Geek Cruise a couple of years ago). He came to the teach-in too. I'd certainly recommend him.
Re: UK Perl Training
barbie on 2007-08-16T06:58:44
I'm contemplating taking it on a small UK tour next year.That would be great, and we have several options to host it too
:) The second course on your (short) list is run by Graham Ellis.It was a short list as that is what my colleague sent to me. As for the trainer, I don't remember Graham, but I was only going by what the course content described. For all I know the content listed could be out of date and the training does involve more current methods and topics. I hope so, as Perl already gets bashed for being old, and it doesn't help if training is not keeping up to date with improvements in testing and development.
