Teaching Programming in Perl

Why Perl?

Learning to program in Perl is fun. Teenagers love it!
Perl is free.
Perl is everywhere! You can download a version for Macintosh, or Microsoft-Windows. If you have a sort of Unix or Linux server around, it will almost certainly have Perl on it, too.
Perl has been deliberately designed to be easy to learn. There is no question that students find it much easier than Pascal or Basic.
Perl has the powerful features and short-cuts that professionals need to get their job done quickly. However, most High-School students need know nothing of these features.
Perl has a lot of online documentation.
The textbooks on Perl are terriffic! They are head and shoulders above their thicker more expensive Visual-Basic cousins.

Where can you start?

In the last twelve months there seems to have been an explosion of texts on Perl. There is even a "Perl for Dummies". I don't recommend you buy it. Instead, I recommend O'Reilly's classic Learning Perl, which is now available in a Unix and Microsoft-Windows version.

I'm told that MacPerl: Power and Ease is also a well written reference. Although you'll need to work through at least the first three chapters of one of these references yourself before you try to teach Perl, you do have my wonderful (ahem!) perl booklet as a teaching aide.

Home