Is it unrealistic to take this approach

No. It's very realistic. This is my single pet peeve about many programmers - they're extremely arrogant. Many people will leave you to believe programming is extremely hard, and requires many years to master. Bullshit. I've seen people go from complete novices to successfully writing first person shooters in 2 weeks. You just have to have the right attitude. You also have a strong background in C (we won't utter the name of its ungodly, bloated extension in this holy place) which is a lot harder to learn than Perl, so it should be a breeze.

For learning Perl 5, I'd first recommend picking up Programming Perl, it's a lot more in-depth and it provides an excellent reference. Give that a quick read-through, try out a couple of the main ideas along the way, then start your project. Remember not to treat Perl special, it's not a magic cure to all your programming problems. You still have to have a solid design process and constantly test and refactor your code.

And now that I've said that, I'd personally recommend you do not learn perl 5. Barring a couple highly targeted bouts of insanity, Perl 6 is going to make it look like TCL. In the meantime, try out Python or Ruby, unless you have a specific reason for learning Perl 5.

Oh and if you want specific suggestions on your project, you'll have to post more about it.

In reply to Re: Newbie Ramping up on a big project by Anonymous Monk
in thread Newbie Ramping up on a big project by Anonymous Monk

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