http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=919713

Perl is powerful. The hardest part of learning of it's powers is starting off, or "Laying Your Foundations". But after that, you can learn Perl's true power, and Begin Your Skyscraper.

MY TIPS TO LEARNING PERL (SECOND)

1) Learn references. References are an extremely powerful tool in Perl. To learn more about references, see perlreftut and perlref in the Perldocs.

2) Perl/Tk. Possibly the most widely known GUI for Perl, this is a very useful tool. It makes Perl fun(ner)! To learn Perl/TK, I would refer you to the book Learning Perl/Tk and then Mastering Perl/Tk. I will also refer you to my tutorial.

3) Keep practicing. Reading a book teaches you to program Perl, but practicing makes you a Perl Programmer.

4) Read the source code for Perl Modules. This is a GREAT way to learn. By reading the source code, you are looking at all of the features of the module, and how far it can really go. Even better, read the source code for Perl itself (although that may be really hard if you don't know C since Perl is partially written in C).

5) Look through all of the programs you have written so far. See what you can fix, what you can do better, and what you did better before (hopefully you excelled and have not gotten worse).

6) Finally, keep up with Perl. I know it may be kind of hard, but it can help you use all that Perl has to offer. Also, make sure your Perl version is up to date (or at least almost up to date) so that everything is compatible.

--perl.j