Back when I was a wee lad (in college), I had a part time job working as a network consultant. I was introduced to Perl when I started working with some software we decided to use to produce one of the very early spam-filtering whatsits. I thought it was okay, but I didn't really get it. I'd primarily had experience with Pascal, C, C++, and Java up to that point. I also started using PHP (3.x) to built a web site for the company around the same time and liked it some.
Then, I graduated right after 9-11, so I decided that rather than braving the already tanking job market (and since I couldn't figure out what else to do), I decided being paid to get a MS in Computer Science was a good idea (and I still think it was). Anyway, about a semester in I was trying to figure out what language I liked. Java was starting to drive me batty. PHP's utter lack of proper OO and namespaces repulsed me. I gave Python a whirl and decided that having only one right way to do things was almost as bad as Java, so I tried Perl again and learned a bit more about it. After reading a few things about it and reading Larry Wall's latest couple Apocalypse's and was sold on what Perl would become (not that I don't like most of what Perl is, but Perl 6 rocks my socks). I read Learning Perl and the entirety of Programming Perl to get started. I've since looked through Programming Perl again to refresh myself, and Perl Best Practices (and threw out 70% ;). Most of what I learn now I learn by finding modules I like on CPAN and reading the code to see how they work (so much for Perl being a write-only language). Cheers, Andrew On 10/5/07, Scott Kahler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > This brought to mind a question that comes up every once in awhile. How > did > you go about learning perl? > > My experience was that I read the first half of Elements of Programming > with > Perl and then jumped it. I happened to be in a heavily perl shop and and > had a VB6 background. Aside from the basics I got from that book most my > learning came from digging through code, flipping back and forth through > Perl Cookbook and creating the occasional disaster and asking the "real" > hackers questions. If I recall my point of enlightenment in order were > > 1) variable without types, sweet! > 2) damn hashes are cool > 3) wow, there is a lot of stuff on CPAN > 4) wow, there is a lot of crap on CPAN > 5) DBI is good > 6) mod_perl > 7) template toolkit = love > 8) creating module packages is damn handy > > I'm still working enlightenment via map, the greatness of OO perl and what > the hell is so cool about cramming a bunch of functions in one line (to > the > point it looks like you opened a binary file in vim) but I imagine > eventually I'll get there. > > I think my experience isn't uncommon with perl people and was wondering > what > path others took. > > Scott Kahler > > > On 10/4/07 10:52 PM, "djgoku" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Learning Perl 4th Edition > > Authors: Randal L. Schwartz, Tome Phoenix & brian d foy > > ISBN: 0-596-10105-8 > > http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/ > > > > Review by Jonathan C. Otsuka > > Kansas City Perl Mongers > > http://kc.pm.org > > 2007-10-04 > > > > > > -- > Scott Kahler > Systems Engineer > uclick, LLC (an Andrews McMeel Universal Company) > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > www.uclick.com www.gocomics.com > > > _______________________________________________ > kc mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/kc >
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