First off Welcome to the Monastary! :)

Get yourself a copy of Perl in 21 days. That is a good starting point for where you're at. The books you do have are invaulable, but I personally think they can be a bit overwhelming if you've never done a lot of programming.

Next, get yourself a copy of Perl - obviously. :) ActiveState's is good for windows. So it's sort of up to you whether you go with 5.6 or 5.8. Other monks here who have more experience with both versions would be better qualified to advise you on that. I'm using 5.6 and it works for me.

Now as far as your debugger, there is a graphical debugger that is available on the web <a href="http://world.std.com/~aep/ptkdb/>here. Personally, I prefer this debugger, but again your mileage may vary.

Also, as a beginner I would say yes, put in use strict, -w and perhaps even use diagnostics to help you catch errors. And remember there's a LOT of good people here that are willing to help.

Good luck!

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.

In reply to Re: Sub-initiate needs help getting started by Popcorn Dave
in thread Sub-initiate needs help getting started by Lori713

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.