Books for a relative Perl newbie

[Marty Pauley]

On Wed Sep  4 10:54:03 2002, Russell Matbouli wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 10:43:21AM +0100, Andrew Wilson wrote:
> 
> > While this may be true, it generally a crap idea.  perl is not c, idioms
> > that are a great way to do things in c are a crap way to do it in perl.
> > Try to learn idiomatic perl.  Having said that, you don't need to learn
> > it all at once.
> 
> Again, I wasn't saying it was a good way, just pointing out that it was
> possible, and that it would flatten the learning curve for someone who
> already knows C. Idiomatic Perl will always be better, but you have to
> get into the way of it first. You'll look at your C-like Perl and say,
> "urgh, that's ugly", then realise that there's a more perlish way to do
> it.

Most people won't look at their C-like Perl and think it's ugly.
They'll say "great, this works".

This language learning problem is not tied to Perl, and is not new:
the same problem has existed with spoken languages for millennia.

20 years ago Jerry Weinberg (in his book that Tony has reviewed:
http://belfast.pm.org/reviews/professional_programmer.html) suggested
that potential programmers should initially be taught 2 languages at the
same time: the second language (spoken or code) is always the most
difficult; if you have 2 first languages then the next one will by your
third, and so you skip the most difficult part.

If you already know one language, it's too late to follow Jerry's
advice.  My advice then would be to learn a language that is very
different from the ones you know.  C is (almost) a subset of C++,
but Java, VB, Delphi, Pascal, Modula2, Ada, and Eiffel are also all very
similar.  If you know these languages, I think you should try to learn
something like Scheme or Haskell.

This might be a good discussion for the lingua list...

-- 
Marty
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