This weekend, a friend took me up on my long-standing offer to teach him perl. He's a network administrator who's looking to automate system tasks and develop some simple monitoring tools. I've told him several times over the past few years that perl is easy to learn and will make his life easier.

Yesterday, we sat down in front of a linux box, and I walked him through the basics: scalars, arrays, hashes, file io, system calls, subroutines, and regular expressions. In order to bolster my claim that with perl, he can do useful and interesting stuff on his first day, I showed him how he could parse interesting information out of netstat. By the time Futurama came on, he had a passable overview of how perl works, and a grip on the syntax. Most importantly, he saw how it is to get started with perl.

My friend has an overview, and he's hooked on the possibilities perl offers. He's got enough perl to start hacking together some simple scripts, I impressed upon him the need for The Camel Book and The Perl Cookbook, and suggested that he start checking out Perl Monks. I also suggested (knowing he's a music junkie) that writing tools to tag and filter his mp3s would be a great first project.

My question for the Monastary is "What next?" What should I show him next? Proper coding practice? An indepth tutorial on pattern matching? The care and feeding of CPAN? Or should I simply show him how to use MP3::ID3Lib and wait for him to return with questions?

-Logan
"What do I want? I'm an American. I want more."

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