[Nottingham] Nottingham Perl Mongers (good/bad idea?)

[Duncan John Fyfe]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Michael Erskine wrote:

> I'm in two minds as to whether to set up a Nottingham Perl Mongers group
> (http://www.pm.org/). I imagine that it would work rather closely with
> NLUG as there is a large amount of overlap - hackers and beer. I know
> there's quite a few Perl folks in the group but we'd never get anything
> together like London Perl Mongers (http://london.pm.org/) with over 500
> members. What do you all think?
>
> Michael.

I can't promise a lot of time but sounds fun.
I've got 6 one hour 'Introduction to Perl' sessions planned for the LUG whenever
in the year we can fit them in.  Maybe they could form a joint venture.

The lesson plans are (kind of):

Lesson 1
Really basic introduction to computer programming in a non perl specific way.
AIM: Give a rounded view of 'what goes on under the bonnet' to de-mystify programming.
So... Turing machines, assembled vs compiled, function/data/object oriented etc
And all in an hour ;)

Lesson 2
Starting with perl propper.  Given Martin's BASH talks  I can hopefully jump straight
into #!perl and cover syntax, data structures and subroutines.
AIM: To provide enough ifor people to start writing simple perl scripts.

Lesson 3
Introduce Perl Modules and CPAN. Start with the 'must know' modules/features
such as 'use strict;' and 'use Getopt::Long;'
AIM:  People should be able to 'use' modules, access the docs and find/install new ones from CPAN
either by hand or vie CPAN.pm / CPANPLUS.pm

Lesson 4
Introduce objects and why they are good/bad.  How to do simple objects the Perl way.
Some modules usefull for doing objects.
AIM:  Leave people with a warm fuzzy feeling about why OO could save them muchos grief in the long run.
Okay, leave test subjects able to write simple classes and (maybe) understand why this is a good thing.

Lesson 5
Inheritance (single and multiple), modules (Class::Struct etc) useful for reducing the burden of class writing.
AIM: The good , the bad and the downright ugly of Perl OO.

Lesson 6
Unplanned as yet but something about using Perl to achieve great (and probably insecure) things
with Apache (and databases ?) so CGI, mod_perl, DBI , Taint... (LAMP ?)


1 and 6 are pretty much stand alone while (2&3) and (4&5) form nice pairs.

I suppose I should write them up properly to make them wavailable.

thoughts ?


Have fun,
Duncan

-- 
Duncan John Fyfe          X-ray Astronomy Group,
                          Dept. of Physics & Astronomy,
Phone +44 116 252 3635    University of Leicester,
E-mail djf at star.le.ac.uk  University Road,
                          Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K.