[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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