Well, this is my story:

In early spring 1999 I decided to try out this 'Linux' thing that came up pretty everywhere. I went to near a bookstore and purchased a box of RedHat 5.2, and - to get the thing going - a copy of "Running Linux" by Welsh and Kaufman. (Being a complete Unix novice this was a good decision.)

I worked through the book until chapter 12, "Programming Languages". I once tried learning C on a DOS box, but I guess I was too young or too impatient or whatever - I gave it up. I guess I wasn't a programming type of computer user, I was happy when my Win95 worked well.

Chapter 12 of "Running Linux" starts with a quick overview of gcc and Makefiles, then goes on to a language called "Perl". Hmmm. I've heard about it. Many people use it for creating guestbooks on their homepages. Sounds interesting... The book then gives a small example of Perl's capabilities, a program that collects the last(1) output and processes it. I didn't understand the code (too many regular expressions - a thing I've never seen before), but somehow I was impressed. The last sentence of the chapter about Perl said that one can be proud if he's called a "Perl Hacker". That was when I thought: "I want to become a Perl Hacker." (I also started studying chemistry because I wanted to do things like MacGyver from the TV series.)

Ok, on to the next bookstore, bought a copy of the only Perl book available, "Perl In A Nutshell". Well, looked nice. Was absolute useless for a beginning programmer. Now I'm glad I bought it, because it is a really good Perl book, but the first time I looked at it, I didn't understand a word.

A few weeks later I thought, there must be a better book for Perl newbies, and I found one at the university's bookstore: "Learning Perl". I remember it exactly: After I purchased it I started reading in the subway on my way home and almost missed the station I had to get off because the book was so gripping. One week later, I was through the book.

I started coding little things, most were stupid from todays point of view. I wrote scripts that could have been better done with shell scripts, I wrote small CGI applications. I went on and bought "Programming Perl" and later the "Cookbook". I never regretted I spent money on any of them.

Then, somehow, I lost interest. I wasn't very good in Perl scripting, my code was too long for Perl. My CGI thingies worked, but they were slow (never heard of mod_perl). I started working at the VUCC, where we already had our local Perl gurus, so there was no need that I concentrate on it. But I had to do work in PHP, and because I already knew Perl, it wasn't very difficult to learn, and it isn't bad either. When doing more and more things in PHP, I always missed one or two features of Perl, like the $_ variable or statement modifiers like print if ... .

Finally I found this place: Perlmonks. Since then I try to rewrite all my PHP apps in Perl, I'm into this Perl thing again, stronger than before. May the camel be with you!

(Ok, this isn't necessarily good enough for an article in TPJ, but I'm sure it'll find a place in a tiny node on perlmonks.org.)