On May 23, Tom Yarrish said:
>Been reading the list for a little while, and had sort of a philosophy
>question for the group. I've been trying to learn Perl for some time
>(in fact, my company has offered to pay for me to take a Sun course on
>it). In the mean time I've been reading through the standard Perl books
>(Learning Perl and Programming Perl for starters), and trying to get an
>understanding. I'm starting to get the gist of the language
>(understanding how arrays work, functions, regex, etc), but my problem
>is how to "think" in a programming style. By that I mean how do I
>approach a possible perl program (like I want to do A, how do I go about
>doing it). What have people done/read/whatever to "think" in a perl
>state of mind. As I said, I've been trying for some time to learn Perl,
>but it seems like this is a hump I can't figure out how to get over.
Well, I tried learning C++ in ninth grade. Actually, I had to -- it was
one of my classes. I just didn't get it. It was all too strict and rigid
and demanding. Then I learned JavaScript (direct all snide comments to
/dev/null, please). Then, at the end of tenth grade, I started learning
Perl.
Perl is nice. Perl let me think how I wanted to think. And it kinda
changed the way I thought. Things like built-in hash support make finding
unique elements a snap. Things like 'for $foo (@bar)' are nice ways to
read loops -- I didn't much care for 'for (i = 0; i < size; i++)'.
And I also lurked in newsgroups and IRC channels and mailing lists.
--
Jeff "japhy" Pinyan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/
Are you a Monk? http://www.perlmonks.com/ http://forums.perlguru.com/
Perl Programmer at RiskMetrics Group, Inc. http://www.riskmetrics.com/
Acacia Fraternity, Rensselaer Chapter. Brother #734
** I need a publisher for my book "Learning Perl's Regular Expressions" **
