I'll encourage you to write practical examples that are relevant to you during training courses with us, and I'll also write demonstrations "on the fly" in front of you. That way, you go away having done something that's relevant, and having seen how programs are designed and written in the language that you're learning from scratch. I know this is unusual for training courses, and it's only practical for us to do it because of the long professional experience and deep subject knowledge of your tutor.

After every programming course, we email each trainee with a copy of all the programs that they wrote during the course, and with a copy of all the examples written by the tutor too. Examples that are found within the training notes are also available via links from our training module index.

To go with your programs, you'll want the relevant input data.

Surprisingly, there are some "issues" with that apparently simple and obvious request.

a) Some of the data files that we use are huge and would clog up anything except the widest broadband link for quite a while

b) There are licensing issues involved with some of the data files - we have copies that we're allowed to use, but not further distribute except under certain conditions that wouldn't be met with an automated forwarding system. See for example the DMOZ license

c) As enclosures, the data files might well be identified as spam or perhaps even as possible viruses by mail filter systems. Even when I have sent a file out by specific request in the past, I've got caught by spam filters.

d) Some of the data files contain our own information which we're quite happy for people to use on courses, but which we don't want to release into the public domain.

So - what solution? How can you use your program after the course? You'll find in our online data directory that you can view the first 20 lines of each data file, and you can copy and paste those lines freely as far as we're concerned. That way, yes, you can test your program, rerun it, and develop it on further to use what is, after all, the final intent of you attending the course - handing your own data.
(written 2005-03-13, updated 2006-06-05)

 G305 - Well House Consultants - Post Course support
  [136] Please tell us - (2004-12-01)
  [199] Post course support - part of the service - (2005-02-02)
  [248] Use me, but use me effectively - (2005-03-16)
  [293] Course follow-ups - (2005-04-27)
  [327] How far should our support go - (2005-05-28)
  [336] Targetted Advertising - (2005-06-05)
  [389] Tough Love - (2005-07-25)
  [509] Snippets from Geekmas - (2005-11-28)
  [516] Open source questions? Anyone can ask. - (2005-12-03)
  [569] Instructions for bright people - (2006-01-19)
  [609] Been on a course, but still not got it? - (2006-02-16)
  [651] Please Register with Opentalk - but just once! - (2006-03-19)
  [1245] Ensuring that our tutor answers YOUR questions - (2007-06-25)
  [1874] Is it worth it? - (2008-11-07)
  [2102] What do people think of our Apache httpd / Tomcat course? - (2009-03-24)
  [2732] Asking about Jesus - (2010-04-20)
  [3045] After Course Resources - do we publish sample answers. Example from Java Exceptions module. - (2010-11-13)
  [3391] For programmers who use Internet Explorer as their browser - (2011-08-13)
  [3419] Data that we use during our training courses, and other training resources - (2011-09-04)
  [3701] Refresh and Revision training class days - Perl / PHP / Python / Lua / Ruby / Tcl / C / C++ - (2012-04-19)
  [3770] Sample answers to training course exercises - available on our web site - (2012-06-21)
  [4588] What teach you in a week stays with you for a decade - (2015-11-29)

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Getting your examples, my examples and the data files after your course
new 'Perl on the Web' example
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Dress for training
Conventional restraints removed
What and why for the epoch