[Kc] Where did your perl come from?

Scott Kahler scottk at uclick.com
Fri Oct 5 07:26:03 PDT 2007


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" <djgoku at gmail.com> 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)
scottk at uclick.com
www.uclick.com www.gocomics.com




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