I’ve spent a lot of the last seven days running training courses. It might be interesting to share some thoughts about how they went.

Last Saturday was Perl School 4. A week before the course I was a little worried about ticket sales, but I did a bit of marketing early last week and managed to more than double sales in a few days. In the end I had 27 people signed up.

Perl School is always enjoyable. I think that people often turn up with quite low expectations as it’s so cheap. So it’s fun to overturn those expectations and give them a day of high quality training. People obviously recognise that as I’m getting a lot of repeat business – at least one person has come along to three of the four courses so far.

Many of the courses I give are overviews of Perl at various levels. This one was just about DBIx::Class so it was great to be able to go into a lot more depth on a single topic. Of course, DBIx::Class is a great subject to cover and it was fun explaining its more powerful corners to a room of people who don’t know much about it.

I thought it went well. But don’t just take my word for it. I’ve been asking attendees to fill in feedback forms about all the Perl School courses and I’ve published a page summarising that feedback.

Then this week has been two two-day courses for flossUK. Two day courses give us time to include practical sessions so that people go home having actually tried out the techniques that I’ve taught – which nicely reinforces the lessons. I really enjoy those sessions as you really see lightbulb moments as people see how easy it is to use these tools. This afternoon, for example, it was great to see people getting a simple Catalyst application up and running in less than an hour. An hour later people were really impressed as I introduced them to Plack::Middleware::Debug and showed them how I could get detailed DBIC_TRACE output on the web page by making tiny changes to the application code. At least one person went away determined to reimplement a number of key applications in Catalyst as soon as possible.

And that, to me, is the joy of running training courses. It’s great to open people’s eyes to the possibilities that these new tools give them. I love to see them leave filled with renewed enthusiasm for the language.