My favorite Perl tutorial. Also, I'm very happy about pack getting a tutorial. Maybe now I can figure it out.

Light a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Catch a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchet

The tutorial you describe, the one on http://www.sthomas.net/roberts-perl-tutorial.htm, covers a lot of subjects, which is good. It warns about some common mistakes, which is also good. But even by skimming over it, I found a lot of mistakes. I'll list some of them below.

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++Juerd

I probably shouldn't have mentioned this tutorial, without going back and reading over it using my newfound understanding of the language. The thing that was appealing to me about the tutorial was that it compiled (which is not true of a signifigant number of online tutorials) and his writing style was easily understood. It is worth noting that several of your complaints could be (emphasis on the could) construed as style arguments. But to say that is as much to retro justify having posted the link in the first place, which I shouldn't be doing :-).

An unfortunate fact is that it may be the best online tutorial that is widely available. In fact, I came across via a link from http://perl.com so in my youthful innocence I assumed it was accurate.

Oh, well.

Cheers,
Erik

Light a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Catch a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchet

Not all of the things you point out are as grievious as you make them out to be.
• Not quoting a heredoc terminator is hardly bad style.
• Strict isn't mentioned early enough which is a valid complaint, but even Learning Perl 2nd ed didn't have and entry for strict in the index, though it does actually talk about it for a few paragraphs on page 99. Did you used to recommend this book? This tutorial does a better job covering strict than the 2nd ed Llama which came out about the same time.
• Subs at the bottom is more of a religious issue. Yes the file scoped lexicals are then shared with the subs but I've never once seen this cause a real-world problem with the code and many coders, of varying skill levels, I've worked with.
• Using # as a delimiter is fine, in the right context. The rule is simple: pick a delimiter that makes the pattern easier to specify, and # does that just fine for many.
• srand was not automatically called in versions prior to 5.004, and 5.004 only initially came out the same year this tutorial was first written (1997 according to copywrite notice).
• He did show the C for loop style, for with range, and foreach over an array discussing implicit use of $_. I really don't grasp your complaint on this point.
I am not saying your points are wrong, and I'm not saying the tutorial is all good and correct, just that this particular tutorial isn't as bad as it has been made out to be. Yes Robert's tutorial is far out of date (last update 1999 it appears), and some content was out of date when it was written. It was still, and maybe still is, one of the better such tutorials out there. I haven't read the new perlintro in 5.8.0RC1 yet.