There's a world of difference between learning to program in xxx language (i.e. learning your first programming language) and converting across from another language, The majority of the language training that we do is conversion courses, but certain courses such as this week's Java course are very much geared for the complete novice. On a newcomer's course it's advantageous to cover some aspects of analysis and design, spend a little time drawing flowcharts (and the annotating them with keywords and curly braces to show how they convert to code) and to provide many "cut and paste" type practicals where the trainee alters our examples rather than writing new code from scratch. On courses where we're converting established programmers - perhaps with years of experience of C - we'll cover language comparisons un-necessary for the newcomer, and we'll be having people unlearn the idea that variables are static in favour of the much more dynamic model that's used in more recent languages.

With Perl Java and PHP, our public course schedule includes offering(s) suitable for both programming newcomers and converters. With Tcl and Tk we find that the majority of learners have no (or little) prior programming knowledge and a "learning to program ..." approach is the norm for most clients. With Python, the vast majority of the client base has programmed before in another language; for newcomers to programming in Python, we'll lay on an extra day if necessary.
(written 2004-10-07 06:01:58)

 

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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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