Stick with it! The fact that you can articulate the frustration so clearly is a positive sign, I think. You're describing the learning process -- and as the cliche goes, it's about the journey, not the destination. Worry less about how much or how fast you're learning Perl and focus on how well you're learning.

Some tactical ideas to help:

• Get familiar with the debugger and how to use it. If there is code you don't understand, use the debugger to step through it.
• Use tools like Data::Dump::Streamer to help you visualize data structures you don't understand.
• Write more code! Perl isn't an abstraction, it's a tool box. Even if you only know a little Perl, you should start using what you know. Solving real problems, no matter how small, is a positive reinforcement to what you're learning.

Hi chexmix,

I understand your frustration. I sometimes feel the same when I do not fully understand the topic at hand. I will give you my 2 cents advice hoping that it will help you.

First, you need to find something practical that you want to accomplish. In other words, you need to find purpose. It could be that you want to develop a game (such as Racing Mice with Language::Logo - MouseRace.pm) or you want to track stocks (as in Get US stock tables from WSJ) , or you want to write a cool obfuscation (like the one in Genetic Code). Whatever it is you want to do with Perl, it is a good idea to have a purpose in mind. Having a purpose will simplify things because you can focus on what you need to learn to accomplish your goal. This will keep you motivated and will help you find immediate use for what you are learning.

Once you achieve your initial goal, you might want to expand your horizon adding new goals and learning new things that will help you accomplish those goals.

Finally, I encourage you to have a look at the following nodes for some useful ideas:

• Re: Real Life Perl Exercises
• The path to mastery
• How to learn Perl efficiently
• Recommended Reading

Cheers!

This is advice I take very much to heart - as an inveterate reader and knowledge-sponge it is waaaaaayyy too easy for me to opt to "read another book" rather than actually DOING something. It is a big struggle for me (maybe the biggest ... marriage was a big one, too, but I've failed that'n twice), but with Perl I am trying to focus on "doing things" with some basic astronomical data, since astronomy is my #1 life-force-passion-devotion-thingie.

That sounds vague. Right now I am trying to really nail down the basics of the language by massaging, spindling and mutilating -- seeing what I can do to -- a copy of some observational data collected by the Saguaro Astronomy Club of Tucson, AZ. This is a collection that has been around for a long time and is used in some software created for amateur astronomers ... so it is looking forward to my "big goal" of trying to code an observation planning-and-logging application.

Hi chexmix,

If you are interested in Astronomy and Perl, you might also be interested in learning about the Perl Data Language (PDL). It was created by Karl Glazebrook, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Johns Hopkins University. To have an idea of what you can do with PDL, I recommend you to have a look at PDL -- Scientific Programming in Perl and to the nodes The Perl Data Language (PDL): A Quick Reference Guide and RFC: PDL Cheat Sheet.

Cheers,

lin0

• I started Learning Perl in the late summer of 1996.
• I turned 50 years old in July of 1996. ('old' and 'gray' are descriptive adjectives; 'bear' is a statement of temperament and fact.) That was ten years ago; I age at one year per calendar year.
• I know the 'schedule issue' all too well. It only get worse as you get older

What I did was take advantage of the local coffee shop. I arranged to get to work forty-five minutes or so before I needed to be in place and functional. I sat down in the back with a double and a scone and began to read. I got through the Llama that way in about two months. I read until either it was time to go to work, or my brain said "I'm full now". Some days I only got through one or two pages, that was OK. I was not really trying to learn the material, I was learning where to find the material again, when I needed it.

Over the next five months, there were a lot of "Oh! That's what that meant!" events as I waded through a Ugly Pile of Code that claimed it was a Spam-monitor. I'd run into something really odd in the code, go back to the appropriate pages in the Llama (and later The Perl -- Many Thanks to Joseph and Randal) and re-read the book for comprehension. Some times I had to re-read three of four times until I figured out the code.

By the end of the year I had a habit started, and I spent the next twelve months working through the basic Perl Cannon (Llama, Camel, Damian's Book, the Panther, the Owl). In the years since I have kept up the habit, working my way through a lot of the basic UNIX literature and such (my current reading is Barth's Nagios book); and the coffee shop has started to build my drink and set the scone out as soon as I walk through the door at 0730. I am nothing if not a creature of habit, after all.

Update -- corrected links; thank you wfsp

http://groups.google.com is very helpful figuring out what things are supposed to do. Search it for terms and read the expalnations.(like "perl sort hash")

It's all getting to be so complex now that you can't know it all, what you need to do is learn how to get answers for your particular problem. It's like swimming.....you just keep your head above water, in the giant ocean of ever-changing information.

And don't forget to keep plenty of sample scripts, and script tidbits as you experiment...... at our age we forget after a few weeks.

Finally, one of my favorite sayings, attributed to Einstein, is "depression is the wellspring of inspiration". What he meant, is that when faced with some seemingly overwhelming problem, he would get depressed at the thought of having to solve it. But that depression, slowed his mind down enough, to see the solution. So don't be dissappointed that you get depressed when facing a big problem. Your mind will keep hacking away, until, voila, you comprehend. I go thru this all the time...(but of course I'm an unemployable misfit :-) ).

http://groups.google.com is very helpful figuring out what things are supposed to do.

I'm so glad you mentioned this! Before I found perlmonks, I found myself Googling to find out how to solve specific problems. It's still a useful addition to the books and this site.

There's also the google codesearch, allowing you to search open source code and examples.

--
wetware hacker
(Qualified NLP Practitioner and Hypnotherapist)

I'm also older than you (unless you're in your very late 40's :-)), but I relish learning new things.  What I usually don't do well is to learn things I have little or no interest in.

Perl was like that for me at first, actually.  I knew I should learn it, as I'd heard a lot about it (and even had to occasionally hack a huge Perl script a colleague had written, without really knowing a lot of the syntax), and was well aware that it was a useful skill to possess.

One weekend, shortly before the turn of the century, after installing Linux for the first time, I decided to sit down and "learn Perl".  I didn't expect to be fluent right away, but thought a weekend should be enough to make a good start, and be able to write a few simple programs.  It didn't happen, though -- there was just too much new material, and with no clear idea of where to start, it was a doomed undertaking.

However, once I did start learning Perl, and had a real need to be using it all the time, the learning process became a lot more fun, and the apparent effort was greatly diminished.

Nowadays, I stick to the things that interest me, and Perl is almost always the tool of choice.  As long as it's something that captures my interest, I'm quite happy to put in the effort to learn it, no matter how difficult it might be.  The flip side of that is, of course, that no matter how easy something is to learn, if it's not particularly fascinating to me personally, I'm quite likely to give up.

I don't know if any of this helps you, but I hope you can find your own pace without feeling discouraged.  Sometimes taking code fragments and rewriting them yourself can give you good clues and insights into their functionality.

And of course, you can always ask your fellow Perlmonks to give you help understanding specific problems; there are a lot of skilled teachers here, with great quantities of patience!

I didn't expect to be fluent right away,

What does fluency here actually mean? How do you define fluency?

I don't know if I consider myself fluent but maybe someone else would. Are my standards to high?

Does one have to be able to code a module without any reference?
Write a "complete" program without any reference?
Write an "efficient" program with/without reference?


I don't know.. makes me curious though... :-)


-------------------------
Cave ab homine unius libri

That's an interesting question.

I'd guess for purposes of defining "fluent", a computer language could be considered fairly similar to a spoken language.  My native language is English, and I would say I'm a "fluent" speaker of English.  And, although I'm not fluent in any other language, I'm conversant in a few others.

Similarly in Perl, I feel I am more "fluent" than in most other computer languages, even though Perl wasn't my "first language".  And just as I occasionally need to lookup English words in a dictionary, I often need to lookup Perl functions, idioms, etc. in the documentation.

I guess, by extension to the analogy, one could liken cpan to specialized words in a spoken language -- if I needed to be able to hold a technical conversation with doctors, I'd need to understand a lot more medical terminology, whereas an in-depth conversation with quantum physicists might require a more specialized knowledge of the language of quantum physics.  Likewise, in Perl, there is a lot of "specialized" programming which I don't know intimately (if at all), but when I need to know it, I'll know where to go.

So, the more "fluent" I get, the more comfortable I'll feel using my language skills (in either Perl or English), but I'll never stop having to look things up.

---

s''(q.S:$/9=(T1';s;(..)(..);$..=substr+crypt($1,$2),2,3;eg;print$..$/

How do you define fluency?

One suspects that he defines it in much the same way as the Concise Oxford Dictionary:

2. a ready command of a specified foreign language.

Cheers,
Rob

For me, the two biggest things that brought significant improvement in the way I code was reading Perl Best Practices, and taking a introduction to Java.

PBP taught me to be consistent and HOW to be consistent, which I found was pretty hard. Until you learn enough on your own you tend to copy what others have done or what is in front of you. Both are bad habits to break. PBP gave me someone I could copy from AND learn how to improve the code I wrote.

I say Java not because I like it, it taught me how to think in object-oriented method. Everything I learned I was thinking, HOW can I do this in Perl? I found I made huge jumps in identifying bad code and how to make my coding easier to understand.

So that is what helped me the most.

I have a few years on you (not a lot, but a few). I picked up Perl a couple of years ago to solve a specific problem - I wanted to shove a pile of documentation written using Word into a wiki. I first read the Camel (a fine bedtime read, but not much fun as a reference book as I recall) then happened on PerlMonks. I've now had a good poke around many of Perl's corners and feel I understand a fair chunk of it.

Much of my learning has been SoPW driven - someone asks a SoPW which I know almost nothing about, so I read the module documentation or whatever seems pertinent, figure out an answer and post it. Great way to learn about all sorts of areas of the language and its application!

Actually, its not just Perl I've learned here. Perl has been a spring board for learning a lot more about HTML, XML, CGI, SQL, UNICODE ... . All of which I've found applications for.

So my suggestion? Browse through the SoPWs and see what you can answer (not that you have to post your answer, but the exercise is great). And if you run into stuff you don't understand, post a SoPW. If you don't understand by the time its ready to post then chances are the question will help someone else to enlightenment too.

To echo an earier respondent, "You're (but) a child," yea, verily, an infant in swaddling clothes. I didn't even toddle out to touch the robe till I was past 60.

But (now that I have that little self-indulgence out of the way) my most effective tutor was the project (well, many of them, and all quite basic) that captured my interest and satisfied a personal or professional need.

And yes, I blasphemed; I cursed the documents at times; I cried out to the heavens at my own rockheadedness; my lack of any CS studies other than those that we self-directed (and the fact that the lessons learned were, thus, spotty and sometimes wrong).

But, persevere! Study as you can, but leaven the host with projects you fancy. Is it a phonebook; a filter; or some other tool that would make your life easier? Why, then, work on one that seems within your reach... and if you hit a block where perldoc -f (something), Search, google, your texts (AND your attempts!) leave you unenlightened, the Monastery's Reverend Brothers (and Sisters) will be pleased to scourge^H^H^H^H^H^H^H dispel your ignorance and add to your fund of knowledge.

So, go in peace, Acolyte and in the faithful hope that you will "internalize the basics" if you refuse to abandon yourself to despair.

"...I am in my mid-40s..."

How are you getting on with putting a hash that maps IAU abbreviations for constellation names to their full names into a module? That sounds very interesting. Have a stab and show us how you get on.

First, many thanks to all who have replied so far - your collective encouragement really is very heartening. :^)

Second, on that constellation names job ... it didn't, or hasn't yet, become a module as such, but it did act as an important step to my better understanding what packages and modules really were.

The short version is it didn't need to be a module for what I wanted to do - I just pulled it in as a text file and created the needed hash programmatically rather than by hard coding it in - for me, at my level, a real step up.

Now, whether this + other astro info could become a useful module one day ... I hope so. I just started dipping into module creation a few days ago. I'll definitely post progress ...

And I got much clearer on the nature of packages with the help of some monks here and from Damian Conway's OOPerl book. GB

The most wonderful thing about senility is you make new friends every day :-)

meh.

And you can hide your own Easter Eggs.

"Age isn't important unless you are a cheese"

I used to have a pad of post-it notes with this slogan, courtesy of a cheese dairy.

There's one aspect of Perl that no one's mentioned yet, and that's the Perl Community. I'm also in my fourth decade, and a regular attender of Perlmonger events especially socials. One of the nice things about Perlmongers is that, in my experience, the group is inclusive, and non-ageist.

Perlmonger social meetings provide an opportunity to chew the collective cud, and to talk about some of the meta issues of Perl programming. Tech talks are even better, as you get the opportunity to learn something.

Keep plugging away and gradually all of the seemingly disconnected bits of Perl knowledge will start to mesh together and, before you realise it, you will be thinking Perl.

Cheers,

JohnGG

I have added this to my "Safari" bookshelf. :^)

The oldest programmer in a place I've worked in was 82. A couple of coders have just retired, at impressive ages, where I am now. (I'm 35 BTW).

My £0.02 on the subject of study: I second the excellent suggestion above of starting with learning 1-2 techniques/functions a day. Don't just learn each one, but think how you'd use it in something you're doing, what it makes easier/quicker, where it might be useless.

For example you could learn 'map' and spend a moderate amount of time pondering how it compares to 'for' or 'foreach'. All this thinking helps me remember stuff as well as getting it straight in my head (and making sure I've understood it). Or comparing 'map' and 'grep'. (I think these are covered together in Intermediate Perl)

If the next morning it doesn't take long to recap what you learnt the day before, you're away! And yes interest is the best aid to study.

ok so maybe that went to about £23.31...

I'll add on to the list of books people are recommending. Try "Pro Perl", by Peter Wainwright, published by Apress. It's a HUGE book, but very well written, and it covers perl from the very basics to advanced topics.

Other languages have the same problem: if you want to learn C++, there are tons of books on the core language, but to do real work you'll also need to learn about the STL, and boost, etc.

It's like having to read (and digest) an encyclopedia before you ever get started, or else you risk reinventing the wheel. I believe the sheer amount of material one must learn is intimidating to many people. And to older people, who have jumped through this hoop multiple times, you get weary of having to do it yet again.

For me, the effort spent learning perl has been well worth it. So I'd say hang in there and keep studying. Besides, all of Randal's books are hilarious! None of my college professors had any sense of humor at all.

Balderdash! I have a terrible memory. I've been using Perl for over a decade and I still have to look up the arguments for "push". (Is it push("$object", @list) or push(@list, "$object")? My brain hurts already!)

However, despite that handicap. Uh... what was I saying? Oh yeah. Despite my memory issues, I've found Perl to be an extremely useful programming language. In fact, I find Python to be a big pain because about 90% of my Perl programs are simple things that I use only once or twice. I don't want to write object oriented code.

I want to spew out the solution as quickly as my memory can (before I forget what I wanted to do). Sitting around and attempting to build an object models is just not for me. I want a variable that can be a string in one second, and a numeric the very next second. Perl fits this to a tea.

Then, there are the more complex stuff that I do. Complex little things that can take four or five thousands lines of code. Again, Perl comes to the rescue. I can quickly create object oriented code, cheat where I need to, and even produce code that is readable and supportable by others.

To me, Perl is the Leatherman of Programming languages.

Huh? The vast majority of my Python scripts are purely procedural. The libraries are OO, but that doesn't affect the structure of my code much.

I made several serious attempts to learn Perl, precisely because I know my scripts would be more concise in Perl than in Python, but I find that my scripting needs are too erratic. Concision requires richness, and I can't retain such a rich language without frequent exposure. Excluding throwaway scripts, I typically spend half a day writing a script and then go several weeks without needing to do any scripting. My attempts to learn Perl ended because every month or two I tried to write a Perl program and ended up spending as much time reviewing the language as I spent coding.

Python is a fairly small, simple language that doesn't present opportunities for wizardry. It's a perfect language for me, but it's probably an inferior scripting tool to Perl for people who are capable of retaining a useful subset of Perl.

I don't understand how Python forces OO at all. I rarely define classes in Python except in fairly large programs, and even then I use them more as datatypes than to implement OO design.

and I still have to look up the arguments for "push"

I'm the same way. I have to look up the correct syntax of push every time.

To me, Perl is the Leatherman of Programming languages.

Awesome line, I hope you don't mind if I use that in my signature (which I will give you credit for of course). Two tools I couldn't live without.