Perl at Sofia University

giving the Practical Perl Programming lectures 2004-2014

YAPC::EU Lighting Talkby 'stelf'

Origin

• A voluntary class... and a voluntary work

• First issue got almost 400 attendees

• Initially quite challenging

• Perl5 only

• a total of 90 hours per semester

Why am I doing it now?

• teaching assistant• class I'm teaching

– Intro to Programming– Object Oriented Programming w/C++– Database Design and Systems– * Practical Perl Programming– * Versioning Systems and IDEs– * Grammars for Generative Art – * Advanced Javascript

Team

• Marin Marinov (until 2005)– currently at HP

• Gheorghi Penkov– Faculty of Math and Informatics at SU

• Petar Pentchev– currently at StorPool

• Evgeni Kunev - 2011, 2012

• a non-profit intiative

PPP History

• 2003, 2004, 2005 - Sofia Unviersity

• 2006, 2007 - New Bulgarian University

• 2011 to date - Sofia University again

• attended by a total of more than 800 students for the time being

Why would we do it?

• we loved perl... a lot. And we still do.

• we have already used it for some 5 years

• we wanted to try what is it having a class at the university

• we though we knew some things better that our professors...

Feedback

• Rumour has it people actually like it

• Though mostly tough geeks make it through to the end

• Projects submitted implicate a good level of understanding

• constantly being improved

Some vague statistics

• 2003/2004 - some 400ppl

• 2004/2005 - some 250ppl

• 2005/2006 - some 150ppl

• 2011 - 30 something • 2012 - 30 something• 2013 - 20 something

Recent Innovations

• teaching by example while making errors

• using TeamViewer to get people in

• using Moodle for interactive tests

• covering modern stuff like Moo* mops, IO::Async, DBIC, etc.

Excerpt from the RegEx lecture

Da teeeeesttt sux 1000000 (million) timesssss

^ $

(е+)

([\D\s]+)

.+? (\d{5,10}\s) (.*)

i

.*?

s

.*

$1 $2 $3 $4

#!/usr/bin/perl

$a =‘Da teeeeesttt sux 1000000 (million) timesssss ';$a =~ /^.+?(e+)([\D\s]+)(\d{5,10}\s)(.*)i.*?s.*$/;

Excerpt from the RegEx lecture

Excerpt from the references lecture

mry

jro

pte

windows linux

beos bsd dos

freebsd sunos vms

A glimpse into

• Examples of examples

• The Schedule

• The end-of-semester projects

• The intermediate tests

Challanges

• People are afraid to use the console debugger

• understanding the context paradigm

• getting used with the vast amount of new syntax

• working with CPAN installations on Windows

• packing / unpacking

• indexing letters in strings

Where is it going

• will probably have to be split in two parts

• needs more help, that is hard to find

• would be great to be completely taped and uploaded

• will benefit a lot from a automated testing environment

• eventually move to Perl6 at some point