"I am totally new to Perl.
This is my first programming language. Is there anything I should know besides the basics? I think I got those down."
Welcome to Perl Monks!
Perl is also my first programming language and after over a year and
a half, I'm glad I made that choice. I was very fortunate to join the
Monastery the day I decided to begin learning Perl. I spent the first
several months going through many of the posts and tutorials. You'll
enjoy your time here, get a lot out of it and meet some really great teachers — you've just met three in davido, Grandfather and (most of the time) Anonymous_Monk. :-)
From one beginner to another here are a few suggestions on where to go from the basics:
- Elements of Programming with Perl covers
much of what is in Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl but differently.
It's definitely geared towards students like you and I who have no prior
programming experience and are beginning our education with Perl. It
teaches you how to think about your problems while going through the
Perl language. Each chapter covers a different topic and ends with a
problem that the author breaks down in 'pseudo code' before
translating it to Perl. The problems are 'real world', fun to do and
expanded upon with questions at the end.
- Perl Cookbook is a great book to grow with especially if you learn best
by example. Each chapter covers a different topic in relatively
bite sized chunks progressing from beginner to more advanced levels. For
now you can just stick to the first example or two in each chapter
moving on to more difficult ones as your skills and knowledge grow.
- For fun: Gödel, Escher, Bach is a
classic book that discusses a lot of common computer programming
theories and shows how they are represented in music, art, math —
basically all of life.
As you are no doubt noticing there are A LOT of good Perl books and
it can get overwhelming quickly. I would caution (slightly at least) against what I did
in my first year of learning Perl and suggest focusing on no more than
three books. ;-)
Best of luck and I hope to see more of you in the coming weeks and months.
Luis
"...the adversities born of well-placed thoughts should be considered mercies rather than misfortunes." — Don Quixote
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|