I have received a lot of good feedback about my YAPC::Asia 2009 Moose course. Several people on IRC and Twitter thanked me. I got second-hand reports of students taking the course then immediately being able to write useful Moose code. That is nothing short of ideal. It makes me very happy that people not only enjoyed the course, but that it was practical.
Several people also wrote blog posts about the course's content and my presentation.
As expected, the students loved the exercises. I feel very strongly that the exercises are the best part of the course. They force you to make sure you understand what you have just learned. It's handy to have a Moose man there to help students when they get stuck. My only regret about this iteration of the course is that we had to skip the last two exercises for time constraints. To the students' credit, every single one did stay well over an hour past the scheduled end time.
I was pleasantly surprised that I received such nice remarks about my live coding. As these are not my slides, I sometimes had to dive into vim to explain a tangential point about Moose. For example, demonstrating the use of has after __PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable (which led to a bug report and then a bug fix — all during the course!). I very much enjoy this style of presentation, but it is difficult to come up with real examples on the fly. It feels great when it all just works.
I had a whole lot of help in making this course happen. A very big thanks to Daisuke Maki and the Japan Perl Association for establishing and marketing the course (and of course running this excellent YAPC::Asia!). Thanks to Emerson Mills for working with me to make the course happen, and for translating the exercises. Thanks to Nathaniel for interpreting my presentation. I did not make it easy for him! Thanks to Kenichi Ishigaki (charsbar++) for helping out with translation, for buying (with his own money) my throat lots of tea, and for being generally awesome. Thanks to all of the students for asking very good, deep questions. It's very satisfying to know one's audience is attentive and thoughtful. Finally, thanks to Dave Rolsky for letting me use his course material yet again. Next week he at long last gets to teach his own course for the first time in Minneapolis.
I look forward to giving this course again. I really enjoy spreading the Moose love.
