Finished my first week of courses (Introduction to Perl, Intermediate Perl, and CGI Programming in Perl) and I'm up to the last course - Object Oriented Perl. All up the courses hae gone surprisingly smoothly, much better than I would have thought for a teaching period of this size.
There's an odd pattern for the machines to disconnect everyone at 12:30pm and 5:30pm each day, which I suspect is some plot by the Information Technology department to have their staff members stop learning about fun Perl stuff and go back to doing "real work", as some of them have put it. Today we got our biggest technical hitch, both the machine with the notes and the backup box (both on totally different networks) went down at lunchtime. This meant lots of "refer to page X of your notes" rather than being able to point with a laser-pointer, but that only lasted about an hour.
Some students are suffering from sheer information overload. They've been doing at least 20hrs/week of Perl, and that's not just practicing what they've learnt, that's learning lots of new stuff as well. I think everyone's done a fantastic job at keeping up. Those who are going on the OO course have been sent home with instructions to read up lots on references.
Managed to do a quick demo of Acme::Bleach in the CGI course today, which was a big hit. I'd just finished talking about HTML::Template (to remove that unsightly HTML from your code), so Acme::Bleach (to remove that unsightly Perl from your code) was the logical progression.
Those people interested in looking at the notes can view them here. Please ignore the under-construction-ness of the webpages.
Those people wanting to talk to me about running a course, please contact me (pjf) at cpan.org.
