shankonit has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello friends i have been learning perl and now i want to learn more but on web based and system administration only. I want to know that should i go for learning web development or just start perl & LWP by Mr Sean and it's a little outdated book so does it really matter or there is other reference to learn .I want to learn writing web clients in perl but seriously i dont now how to make websites should i go for web development or should i learn perl & LWP and then can go for web development(php)

  • Comment on is perl & LWP by Sean Burkey outdated ?

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Re: is perl & LWP by Sean Burkey outdated ?
by hippo (Archbishop) on Oct 23, 2015 at 10:55 UTC

    For those wondering, Perl & LWP by Sean M. Burke is now available online.

    I want to learn writing web clients in perl but seriously i dont now how to make websites

    A web client is not (usually) a website. Which do you want to create?

Re: is perl & LWP by Sean Burkey outdated ?
by Preceptor (Deacon) on Oct 23, 2015 at 10:52 UTC

    You're asking on a perl board whether perl is a good choice? The answer is 'yes of course, perl is Win and Amazing'. Of course, I'm a little biased. You can do websites in perl too, using things like Mojolicious or Dancer.

Re: is perl & LWP by Sean Burkey outdated ?
by locked_user sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Oct 23, 2015 at 14:20 UTC

    Also be careful when you say, “Web Development (PHP).”   PHP is not the only language used for creating web-sites, and in fact I think that it is a rather inferior choice.   Today it is possible to create many web sites without writing any source-code at all.   Furthermore, much of the time you will be being asked to work on an existing site, not a new one, and it’s anybody’s guess what technique might have been used at the time.

    Always try to glean programming knowledge in context.   Look at how several different languages (and rapid-builder tools) do the same thing, and be sure that you are not looking just at books which described how it was done when the web (and PHP) was new.   There’s a lot of “prior art” out there now, that’s being used much more commonly than starting from ground zero.   You will find quite a few web-sites on places like GitHub ... places where the complete source-code of a site constructed in this-or-that can be found ... and study them.   Deconstruct them.   You’ll be doing a lot of “deconstructing the inner workings of existing code, so that you may enhance it and/or fix it” on the job.