> Any suggestions from this group as to what would make sense to put effort > into learning next to make myself more marketable in the Boston area? > > Should I try and learn Java? If so, any recommendations as to > books/tutorials? > > What about Ruby or Python? Would those be useful together with Perl or are > they usually mutually exclusive? > > Anything else?
There is no point in learning another single-threaded, minimum-performance productivity language such as Python or Ruby when you already know a single-threaded, minimum-performance productivity language. Looks the same on the resume except looks like you don't have confidence in Perl. Also, there is no way to use Perl and one of those at the same time. Unless you are insane like me and want to use pychart from perl, which means generating code for an indentation- syntaxed language from a language that looks like line noise in the first place :-) As people said, you should either go SQL if you want to go a business route, which will definitely also require to learn new web techniques starting with Ajax. Or C if you want to be more "technical", and you can write Perl modules in C. Do not say "C/C++" on your resume. That means "I just know enough C++ to kill all your memory bandwidth with unintentional object copying". If you do C++ you need to be prepared for a major time investment. I think Java has been killed in political squabbles long ago but others still like it, YMMV. You are unlikely to find Java advocates on a Perl mailing list :-) Shell scripting is more useful than people commonly assume if you are aiming for jobs that involve some kind of running computers, and it is also useful for build systems. There is nothing worse than somebody with insufficient background hacking up a /etc/rc script or making your build even more fragile. In the end it might be better to pick something you want to do such as an OpenSource project and then just learn whatever is required to get *that* done. Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <[email protected]> http://www.cons.org/cracauer/ _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
