Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2006-01-26 06:48:21 - Graham Ellis
* Course - Perl for Beginners. * Tutor lead lessons - Learning to Program in PHP. * Classes in MySQL from the ground up.
Our IT industry can be so inward-looking at times! Many training courses are really conversion courses where a programmer skilled in language P learns language Q. Such courses are certainly a product for which there's a market need, but there's also the need for a different product - "Learning to ..." courses.
I was on a cruise to Alaska with Larry Wall (the guy who wrote Perl) together with a bunch of around 100 other enthusiastic practitioners, and someone asked Larry if he would recommend Perl as a first language. "Sure, why not" was his reply. Mind you, taking a survey of the group, most of them had started with something else. So ...
There's a lot of very bright people out there who are "computer=savyy" or "net-aware" but have never programmed or designed a database in their lives. Quite simply, they've had too much else to do from blowing glass to offering legal advice, to reporting for the local paper. But something brings them to PHP or to MySQL. The need for a specialist statistical analysis of some data perhaps, or a requirement to make information interactively available through a web site. And it's very hard to find an absolute beginner's course for such people.
Personally, I love running some of our more fundamental courses. To see the real and very effective results - and pleasure too - that people get from what is rarely rocket science. A joy, and a customer's requirement well met. I appreciate that many tutors feel that the more fundamental stuff is beneath them, or assume that their class knows these things; that's fair enough on a course that's labelled "intermediate" or "advanced".
If you're learning Perl, or PHP or MySQL or Tcl from scratch, we can help you with a training course - (matrix). If you're learning Python or Ruby from scratch, we can probably help too; please email me and let me know a little bit about what you're looking for.