This sounds like a difficult situation for the "intern". No pay and can't afford books? I hope he is resourceful.

I can afford books, but I learned Perl solely by using internet resources. PerlMonks is an excellent source of course as is PerlDoc and if he is a Win32 type ActiveState.

It seems he has access to a PC of some sort hopefully it is hooked into the internet.

He needs a problem to solve that he understands to start with. Re-writing the Unix utils is good, but may be too much to start with. Give him access to some good code and encourage him to write like that.

20050417 Edit by ysth: make perlmonks link domain name-agnostic

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