Hello Richard: I totally agree with you. My hands-on experience with Perl has been limited... roughly an hour a day for the past several months. I've been dabbling quite a bit with DBI and ImageMagick, but that's about it. My regex knowledge is also still very weak.
Recently, I tried to write a script that takes MCAS questions and graphics (public domain - not illegal) from the DOE website and organizes it into a mySQL database. It worked! But my god, the code was so ugly and the process was so slow! It took about 1-2 hours to fetch 3,000 records and the images associated with them. Ha ha. :( To make a long story short, I guess I'm looking for books that will help me program more effectively from the get-go. Minh - Oh, in the last email I forgot to thank Brian Reichert for the link to Greg London's book. Thanks Brian :) -----Original Message----- From: Richard Morse [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2006 2:32 PM To: Minh Vo Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] Thank you for the book/resource recommendations On Sep 12, 2006, at 11:03 AM, Minh Vo wrote: > I just wanted to send a small thank you to everyone (particularly > David, > Duane, Uri, Shlomi, Greg, Bob and Joshua) for their quick response and > helpful feedback. I didn't expect to get so many responses! That > aside, it > looks like I'm in for several months of heavy reading. :-) Just to throw in my few cents, I found that although there are a lot of good books out there, you need to actually be using the language to start to good with it. Just reading the books will not really make you facile with the language. Do you have any particular projects that you want to get done with Perl? Preferably something simple? My first Perl project was a simple CGI. Looking at it right now, it sucks. But it was simple to start with. CGI isn't such a simple thing now, however perhaps there's a text file you need to manipulate? Or a database you need to write some queries against? Or some repetitive task you need to script for your computer? I would suggest taking what you already know from your reading of "Learning Perl" and seeing what you can do. Then, you can use other books as resources on how to improve from where you are. The above is very rambling, but the point is that you will find your learning much easier if you are learning with a goal in mind. Start working with manipulating text files, and once you have a handle on that domain, try a different area. HTH, Ricky _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
