December 13th Meeting

Curtis Poe poec at yahoo.com
Fri Nov 30 19:22:04 CST 2001


Leuth,

Skill level absolutely is NOT a prerequisite :)  The goal of Perl Mongers is to promote Perl,
period.  If you "must be this tall" to attend Perl Mongers, we'd be preaching to the choir.  If
you want to learn more about Perl or just learn whether or not Perl is really suitable for what
you want to do, come join us.

> BRIEF INTRO:  I work for a translation company ("word mongers"?), managing
> all file conversions & dbases created with/through Computer Aided
> Translation Machinery (CATM) software 

Frankly, I think things like this are tailor made for Perl.  Of course, depending upon what you
really need, Perl may not be your best option.  (sorry, people, but it pays off to be fair)

> Is this a reason to attend?  Should I wait for a "technical" meeting?

Don't wait for a technical meeting.  It's been my experience that they can often be over the head
of people just starting out.  Perhaps technical discussions aimed at basic Perl skills might be in
order, depending upon the demand.

There are actually two things you should be learning:

1.  How to program Perl.
2.  How to program well.

Many, many programmers get one or the other, but not both.  Good programming is considerably more
complicated than simply knowing all of the functions and modules that are available.  Books like
"The Pragmatic Programmer" or "Code Complete" deal with issues like this.  You can read
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=108286 for an overview of some of these issues.
  
> Also, I had a couple of discussions with someone through this list about
> hosting meetings at our house & that offer is most definitely still open.
> Perhaps I should attend the "meeting" just to discuss that!  =)

Hey, that's awfully nice of you.  I've convinced the owner of our company to occasionally host
meetings and I'm sure a few other people can come up with places.

Cheers,
Curtis "Ovid" Poe

PS:  You can respond to the following question in a private email:  where do I know you name from?
 Were you on the Lobster list?

=====
Senior Programmer
Onsite! Technology (http://www.onsitetech.com/)
"Ovid" on http://www.perlmonks.org/

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