Geekuni

I completed the Perl course by Andrew Solomon about 2 months back. This course was what I just needed. It covers almost all the perl basics with good explanation and well designed practice exercises. It helped me achieve a good level of confidence on... Read More my perl skills. Highly recommended to everyone.

Increased my productiveness by revealing unknown Perl caveats, the step-by-step increase in complexity, all full of examples and requiring me to work on solving the exercises has helped me to build a good base knowledge in Perl which was very important... Read More the job I had at hand.

A smartly structured and well paced Perl course which starts from the bare-bones basics of "Hello World" and concludes with a complex project which fuses together all skills and concepts learnt along the way. I went from zero Perl knowledge prior to this... Read More course to being able to write my own Perl scripts and understand and contribute to production code within the space of just two weeks. Highly recommended for anyone wishing to learn this language.

I had always been interested in programming and had dabbled here and there throughout my teenage years and mid 20s. I'd done quite a bit of HTML & CSS and played around with making my own websites but on the proper programming side I had also dipped into... Read More some basic Python courses online (Treehouse) and a bit of C# (Learning to make games in Unity).

When I started my role in the technical team two and a half years ago, I was very interested in trying my hand at development. Unfortunately as I had no real experience (bar some minor self taught knowledge) with programming, I didn't really see a way to get my foot in the door. Luckily, a few months later, we hired a trainer, and his role was designed to be partly based on mentoring junior developers & apprentices. As he hadn't hired any apprentices yet, and he saw that I was interested in programming, he suggested that I evaluate the course from the perspective of an apprentice, which I was happy to accept.

My main goal was to learn enough to be able to contribute, if only a little, to the codebase and do a little development as part of my role in this team as I find the problem solving aspects very satisfying. I also wanted to be able to understand terminology and concepts that the developers discussed day to day. In a more personal capacity, I wanted to gain enough knowledge so that I had a solid foundation to build on and work on side projects at home in the future.

I have now contributed to the codebase (if only in very small amounts) and can generally understand most technical conversations that take place in the office here.

The course is comprehensive and gave me a solid framework for learning more advanced Perl down the line. The UX can sometimes feel a little clunky but works for the most part.