<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div>On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 12:36 PM, Ben Hare <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:benhare@gmail.com" target="_blank">benhare@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">there are already many Perl tutorials online and... camel book, camel<br>
book, camel book! as everyone has said already.<br>
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</div></blockquote></div><br>
The Camel book is comprehensive, but I think of it as more a reference
for developers already familiar with the basics. The Llama book is a
better one for learning the basics. Another good introductory book
which I used when I was starting to learn Perl is Beginning Perl, which
is available for free online: <br>
<a href="http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/" target="_blank">http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/</a><br>
<br>
John, it's great to hear that you're enjoying learning Java. I hope you
come back to Perl at a later time. Not to say "my language of choice is
better", but the reasons I like Perl are: <br>
<br>
a) CPAN, which is an awesome resource. I had a problem the other day
when someone sent me a python script to work on which used a module
which took me 15 minutes to track down through google...<br>
<br>
b) it doesn't force you into a particular way of approaching a problem... any way that you naturally think about a problem will
translate into Perl (as long as the way you think about it is logical -
which is usually the hard part). Because of this, you can spend the
time that you're programming thinking about the problem domain rather
than the language. I find with other languages, the hardest part is
learning to think in the way that the language forces you to. I find that as I learn more and read more of other people's code, I can now think of lots of different ways of doing something, whereas when I was beginning, I usually only had one way. TMTOWTDI means that I'm always searching for an elusive "most elegant way of doing x"<br>
<br>
c) A lot of common things are really easy in Perl ... regular
expressions are either not available or an absolute nightmare in the other languages I've used.
File i/o is simple and quick in perl - in java it's not hard but it does take a
lot more keystrokes. I like it that strings and integers and booleans are not a pain to convert.<br>
<br>
d) I like "do or die" - it can be a bit clumsy sometimes but I find it neater than try catches Java. I also like that it's optional...Java wont even compile if you don't catch thrown exceptions. Sometimes you want something quick and dirty to do something once and you don't care that much if it dies.<br>
<br>e) There's lots of sugary sweetness from other languages sprinkled over everything.<br><br><br clear="all"></div></div>Myf White<br>mailto:<a href="mailto:myfwhite@gmail.com" target="_blank">myfwhite@gmail.com</a><br>
<br>Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.<br>
~ Satchel Paige<br>
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