Despite taking several programming courses in high school and undergrad, I was never able to fully grasp the concept of programming. Sure, I understood many of the more basic concepts, but being able to sit down and write something that did more than print out some text or take in input from the user.
During my last semester of undergrad, I had to complete a senior project which covered all of the concepts of my major, one of which was programming. Fortunately, we were able to use any language, as long as it met the requirements for the project. After stumbling across Perl, I decided to give it a try. The first book I bought was Perl Scripting for Windows Security but quickly realized that while it aligned perfectly with my project, it was too advanced based off of my level of experience. Then I bought Beginning Perl, and immediately it started to click. I eventually moved on to writing more advanced code, more advanced for me at least, and was able to utilize Perl in my career as a security engineer, writing scripts to automate some of the testing procedures that my team used on a regular basis. This ultimately led to the team improving our productivity since we no longer had to babysit our tools. As I was the only person on the team the knew Perl, I became the go to person if someone wanted to know if/how to do something using Perl. This is something that to this day, about five years later, my former coworkers have discussed with me on occasion.
Unfortunately, due to a change in positions, and a need to work with Python, I haven't been able to work with Perl in several years. I will still pull out old code and made adjustments based off of things I've learned. I've found the resources and openness of other members in the community to be a valuable resource along the way.
In reply to Re: How has Perl affected you?
by rspishock
in thread How has Perl affected you?
by stevieb
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