Re^2: What's missing in Perl books?

That sounds surprisingly similar to my comments on Creating an Intermediate Perl Programming Curriculum, except for the language-agnostic aspects.

I agree that "how to think like a programmer" is the sort of thing I'd love more people to understand. However for (wannabe) Perl programmers there are many language-specific areas that it would be useful to include, ie community resources and the like; it would be difficult to expand that to represent appropriate information about every language out there, but leaving the information out would reduce the utility of such a book greatly.

For myself, I stopped reading technical books a long time ago. I'd be far more interested in a book of meditations, a collection of things along the lines of Joel's essays from people such as Larry that think meta and create interesting analogies.

Hugo

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Re^3: What's missing in Perl books?
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Nov 16, 2005 at 14:38 UTC

However for (wannabe) Perl programmers there are many language-specific areas that it would be useful to include, ie community resources and the like; it would be difficult to expand that to represent appropriate information about every language out there, but leaving the information out would reduce the utility of such a book greatly.

I learned how to type in several programming languages before I learned how to program. I would say that I learned how to program about 2-3 years ago. Since then, I've picked up a couple new languages, including my current interest, Ruby. In 2 weeks, I've been able to program at a very high level in Ruby, solely because I know how to program.

Once someone groks programming, there is no language that cannot be learned and mastered very quickly. The concepts are the tough part - syntax is easy.

My criteria for good software:

Does it work?
Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

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