Hello Monks,

I've been programming Perl for roughly a year, but have programming experience in several other languages. I started teaching myself Perl (along with PHP) as a result of an internship position that required generation of dynamic webpages.

Since then, I've stuck with Perl and have used it for a wide range of things, ranging in levels of difficulty. I love programming in Perl! I buy books to learn more and hang out at PM.org to learn from others with more experience. After a year, I feel my knowledge of Perl is strong enough to get things accomplished, but I often find myself providing a drawn-out response to a question that other Monks answer in a few lines of usually fairly complex code.

Perhaps my problem is not enough "real world" experience. While others program in Perl for a living, I spend my Perl time building personal webpages and tossing together a few reg exps to manipulate parts of a document. I'm looking to obtain a job as a programmer after I graduate college, but feel that if I'm going to have ANY chance of making it as a Perl programmer, I need to get on the ball.

I guess my question is what I should do to take my knowledge of Perl to the next level. I own several Perl books and have read through them, but I don't feel like my ability to program efficiently in Perl is increasing. What should I do? Pick up more books? Look through professional level code? What is the normal next step (if there is one) for an aspiring Perl Monk? I feel like I've hit a brick wall, but know that there is certainly MUUUUUUUCH more out there for me to learn. Is there a direction that I should head in (webpages, databases, etc)? What's hot on the market?

Okay, excuse any "unclearness" in this post, but I'm exhausted from a week of final exams. Oh boy, Operating Systems final exam tomorrow, bright and early!

Thanks in advance. -Eric

In reply to the next step by emilford

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.