| Chapter | Timing Suggestions |
|---|
| 1 |
You must never skip your housekeeping but, as always,
roar through it because people are anxious to "get started". |
|---|
| 2 |
Chapter 2 can be skipped except:
- The two Hello World labs
in which the students make sure their Perl interpreter
and web server are installed and working.
If the classroom sysadmin has done his or her
job properly, you should be able to get
through this in under five minutes, and be
done with Chapter 2.
|
|---|
| 3 |
Chapter 3 can be skipped except:
- The diagram
on the main chapter page is extremely
valuable if some of your students are not clear
about the big picture -- the web and its protocol.
Stay focused on the main idea:
the content of the protocol exchanged by the browser
and the server, i.e. how the browser requests a page
or invokes a CGI script, and what the server replies
(an HTTP header and body). Ten minutes or less.
- To make the HTTP protocol really come to life,
you can do the telnet demo.
5-10 min.
- Also, an advanced class may want information about
tricks you can do with special fields in the http
header (e.g. getting a web page to automagically refresh itself)
so you could come back to this chapter toward the end of the
day to answer those questions if you have time.
|
|---|
| 4 |
Chapter 4 can be skipped unless someone asks about
server logs. As with Chapter 3, try to save this material for
the afternoon if and when you have the luxury of time.
|
|---|
| 5 |
Chapter 5 is the meat of the course.
- Get to it as soon as you can, ideally by mid-morning break.
- If you can get through it by lunch time, you're doing great.
- Just about everyone in your class
is there because they need to process forms.
The rest of the material in this class is icing on the cake.
Concentrate on the meat.
- The monster lab in Chapter 5 is where they do forms processing,
in depth. This lab is so valuable it's worth the hour or
more it takes to do it thoroughly.
- In doing this lab, some of your students will ask for
debugging techniques. You can point them to Chapter 4
(which you skipped) but, better yet, show them how to
debug on the command line:
Show them how to run their script on the
command line and
enter the name=value pairs that CGI.pm asks for.
You can demo shortcuts such as cutting-and-pasting
this data or redirecting the input to avoid retyping
it every time.
|
|---|
| 6 |
Chapter 6 is quite advanced.
You may need to skip it if Chapter 5 takes a lot of
time; it's a technique that's cool but not essential,
and can be skipped without great content loss.
Nonetheless, there's something very appealing
about the idea of both generating and processing
a form with a single Perl script.
If your class is advanced, they'll appreciate this. |
|---|
| 7 and 8 |
Chapters 7 and 8 can be skipped.
They present techniques that are intriguing
but not commonly used. |
|---|
| 9 | Of course, you must always review
at the end of your class. Since you may not have
met all the objectives (you probably skipped some
chapters) this may be your opportunity to fill in
the gaps. |
|---|
