[Pdx-pm] Re: Noob...
John Springer
john at digitalmx.com
Fri Mar 19 01:10:24 CST 2004
Perl will be really rewarding once you "get it".
I learned perl "on the fly" when I started doing web scripting about 10
years ago. It's taken a long time,
and there's still a big gap between me and the kind of skills you see
represented on this
list. I mean, this is the best of the best. Portland is a gold mine
of perl expertise.
But there's nothing that's a substitute for just writing code to solve
various real world
problems. I highy recommend two books: the Programming Perl book and
the Perl Cookbook.
Both are OReilly publications. The first is THE reference book for
Perl and the other has lots
of practical sample applications in it.
CPAN can be a bit overwhelming at first. There's lots of stuff there:
in fact, maybe too much
stuff. It can be really hard to separate the great from the not so
great and it's a little scarey
the first time CPAN decides it needs to update everything in your perl
library, including perl. There are a few
extremely important modules though, like LWP and CGI, that are in
everyone's toolkit. Perl Cookbook
is very helpful for identifying critical perl modules as well.
Anyway, you will discover that once you learn some perl and in
particular get comfortable
with regular expressions, you will be able to do stuff easily that
other programmers struggle
with. Knowing perl is really liberating, because you can solve just
about any text-handling problem
quickly and easily.
On Mar 18, 2004, at 12:18 AM, James marks wrote:
> And, of course, as soon as I sent my question in I solved the looping
> problem by using $' to search the portion of the string that remained
> after the first regex match...
--
John Springer
Somewhere in Portland
Where it's probably raining.
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