Teaching the Open Source Way

By:

Over the last five years RMIT/CSIT has made extensive use of Open Source languages and tools in their teaching program. As part of this we have been teaching PHP as a first programming language, which seemed like a revolutionary idea at the time, In this paper I’ll discuss what we’ve done, what worked, what didn’t, why others should do the same, and why you shouldn't teach linked lists in PHP.

Stream: Education

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Laura Thomson is a trainer, programmer, consultant, and writer based at the School of Computer Science and IT at RMIT University in Melbourne. She has many years experience programming with PHP and is the co-author of the books "PHP and MySQL Web Development" (now in 3e, Developer's Library 2004) and "MySQL Tutorial" (MySQL Press 2003). She has previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group, in the telecommunications industry, and as a freelance contractor. She is currently completing her PhD in the area of Web Personalization Frameworks.