1. Can Perl perform every programming task I will ever need to perform? i.e. Sys Admin, CGI, etc..

if your needs are fairly typical, perl will get you pretty far. you'd have a tough time writing a device driver or similar super low level stuff in perl. but to be fair, you could say the same thing about nearly any turing-complete language. many of us here just think that perl has hit a sweet spot in the power/ease trade-off. as far as sysadmin type stuff, perl is almost ideal. its standard library maps almost directly to the UNIX libraries and applications, it's fantastic at text-processing and UNIX is text-heavy, and if there's something you can't do in perl, you can just use backticks or a system() call to execute the shell code, or use Inline::C to do lower level stuff.

2. What additional programming/scripting languages should I learn in conjuntion with Perl to better enhance my "all-around" programming possibilities? In other words, what additional languages work well with Perl?

thinking strictly as a UNIX sysadmin, it wouldn't hurt to learn some C. not necessarily to actually code in it, but to have a better understanding of the guts of UNIX. knowing how libraries are linked, what goes on inside Makefiles, etc can frequently be a lifesaver. i can't even begin to count the number of times i've tried to install some program only to find it not compiling and had to go dig through the Makefile and the C source to track the problem down. often it's just looking in the wrong place for a library or something easily fixed, but i'd be screwed if i wasn't comfortable getting into the innards.

don't shy away from the shell scripting either. bash is super easy and if you spend most of your time at a bash prompt, knowing it inside and out will improve your productivity even when you're not actually "coding".

probably the other important one to be familar with is emacs lisp if you swing that way. otherwise, learn vi real well. either way, know your editor and learn how to make it work for you.

anders pearson

In reply to Re: Survey my peers by thraxil
in thread Survey my peers by /dev/null

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