Paul Lalli wrote:
On 11/27/05, Tom Yarrish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I've been reading this list for a while, and I've been trying to
learn perl on my own for quite some time. However, my job doesn't
really (from my vantage point at least) "allow" me to do any sort of
programming (by that I mean my day to day work is more administrative
and project related versus writing any code). So it makes it
difficult for me to apply what I've read from the O'Reilly books to
real world problems (and I've read the Llama book a few times).
My main issue has been trying to come up with a way to build up any
type of perl skills, and I know to do that requires writing code.
However it's been difficult for me to come up with something to
write.
Tom,
I do use Perl all day long just about every day, so I'm definately not
in your situation. However, you may be interested in sites such as
the "Perl Quiz of the Week" found at: http://perl.plover.com/qotw/
They send out two quizzes every week (one "beginner" and one more
advanced). You can try to solve the quiz and send in your solution.
After a week, the various solutions are discussed.
Hope this helps,
Paul Lalli
A highly specialized case. Few years ago, I did student admin and taught
physics at the same time.
Taking decisions on student progress conditions required information
generated from Excel files.
These were compiled manually by others which took up to two weeks and I
became impatient and decided
to learn Perl to automate the process of data entry into Excel. I learnt
about Spreadsheet::ParseExcel
and Spreadsheet::WriteExcel modules and added later Win32::OLE to my
list of tools to survive in a Windows-centric
environment.
If you deal with Excel data a lot, then learning Perl can help automate
some of the tasks. It's addressing problems in one
particular computing environment but it's still Perl. Perhaps a hands on
approach.
Alfred Vahau
IT Services
University of Papua New Guinea
