Perl workshop deux finished tonight. I had about 20 to 25 people show up, down from the first week's 60 or so. I'm not bothered because only THE STRONG HAVE SURVIVED! --- Rather, only the interested. In one and a half hours I covered subroutines, references, the debugger basics, modules, namespaces and Exporter. (Slides and examples)
Things I need to improve upon: Stay on track. However, aside from a humorous rant about how I dislike the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade, most of my digressions were Perl-related. I promised that I'd cover something remotely cool --- I felt it was worth it with my side example in showing how to use LWP::Simple's get() function and then changing the user agent to make sites respond to us that would normally ignore us. They seemed to like that.
Also, at the very least, sync up with the Perl cheat sheet. I totally skipped mentioning that the sigil for subroutines is the ampersand, but recovered.
I was also unprepared to fully a question about precedence, but I'll be more prepared for that when I cover "The weird, the Hairy and the Gross: Syntax that bites you."
Additionally, I stumbled a lot. This was mostly due to exhaustion which, let me tell you, is acceptable during this part of the semester.
Things I appeared to be good at: Keeping them interested. Now that the crowd was smaller and more focused (despite some other class project going on in the lab), I think the students feel more comfortable. Similar to my Cadubi rant, my rant about Macy's was successful. I seem to have this thing for entertaining people while bitching...
Things I wish would happen: More time. Kevin once had a tarball called "wednestay.tar." I need to grab that from him as the workload from these other class projects is nuts.
