| CONTACT: | Trish Gray (707) 827-7256 trish@oreilly.com |
February 10, 2010
New Perl Course Authored by Peter Scott Available from the O'Reilly School of Technology
Introduction to Perl Arms Aspiring Programmers with Valuable Skills
Sebastopol, CA—The O'Reilly School of Technology (OST) has announced a new course designed to help current or aspiring Perl coders learn new skills, build experience, and earn a University Certificate, all online. Perl 1: Introduction to Perl is a self-paced, instructor-coached course written by well-known Perl trainer and Perl Medic author Peter Scott. This is the first course in the upcoming four-course Perl Programming Certificate Series, which will be offered through OST and the University of Illinois later this year.
“Remember always that Perl is fun,” says Scott. “Perl is a language that allows you to express yourself in so many different ways, that you end up creating a program that’s beautiful no matter the application.”
According to Scott, he wrote Perl 1: Introduction to Perl to provide a strong foundation not just for beginners, but for professional Perl programmers as well: “I’ve seen a lot of people try to do the more complex stuff, without knowing the fundamentals, and it trips them up. They go many times slower than they would if they had just mastered the basics.” Fundamental skills learned in this course include data types, conditionals, interpolation, arrays, lists and hashes. Once those are mastered, students move on to cover subroutines, loops, formatted printing, data mapping, sorting, and working with external files.
OST courses use a unique, constructivist learning technique in which the student is actively engaged in creating real projects while material is being presented, all the while being coached one-on-one by an instructor. With guidance from Peter Scott’s courseware, students in Perl 1: Introduction to Perl build Perl programs within OST’s Learning Sandbox™ web application, handing projects in to their instructors for feedback, practicing and improving until the skill is mastered. Says Scott, “The beauty of the OST approach is that the people that want to go faster can do that, and the people that want to go slower can do that, because it’s self-paced. That means that we really shouldn’t be leaving any students behind in this course.”
Upon completion of Perl 1: Introduction to Perl, students will earn 4 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) from the University of Illinois Office of Continuing Education. More importantly, they will have built an online portfolio of professional Perl projects that can be shown to potential employers who, according to Scott, are having trouble finding Perl programmers even in the current economy. “There isn’t enough expertise out there in Perl – it’s kind of a paradox. There’s not a lot of Perl training, yet there’s a lot of demand for good Perl programmers.”
In addition to the Perl course and upcoming Certificate series, the O'Reilly School of Technology currently offers certificates in Database Administration, Client-Side Web Programming, Linux/Unix System Administration, Java Programming, Web Programming, Open Source Programming, .NET Programming, and PHP/SQL Programming.
For more information about the O'Reilly School of Technology, including a current list of certificate and courses, see: http://www.oreillyschool.com
Specific information about the Perl course can be found here: http://www.oreillyschool.com/courses/perl1/
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