I run into that same problem a lot while trying to find tutorials that target beginners. Absolute beginners, the kind showing up to my organization's Google Sum

I run into that same problem a lot while trying to find tutorials that target beginners. Absolute beginners, the kind showing up to my organization's Google Summer of Code chat rooms. It's rare to find tutorials that just keep it simple enough. I wanted a regex one recently. First off, they all presumed mastery of the concept of a string, but more seriously, none of them had a really good definition of a regex! I still can't think of one myself, but I know it's probably not "pattern to match specific strings", because it uses an uncommon meaning of "pattern" and a jargon meaning of "match". And of course they all immediately used terms like "formal languages". The perldoc page 'perlretut' did pretty well with "a template that is used to determine if a string has certain characteristics" - ok, a bit abstract for my taste, but let's keep going - then a bit further down they use "modifier" (flag) with no definition. But I really had to look hard for flaws in that one. I guess the only way to actually nail this is to supervise successive groups of students as they try to learn using your tutorial-in-progress...