So to the monks I humbly prostrate myself - what must I do to start my journey into this new, free world? What great and adventurous trials lay before me? And how long can I expect to venture between these worlds before I can leave my citizenship in the world of Windows behind me?
First, don't deny your heritage. Perl is a great wonderful language. It fufills many purposes while being a very stable and complete language. Someday, you'll find VB, or another language you know, to be more fitting to whatever task you are trying to accomplish. While perl isn't a one trick pony, this pony isn't well suited for everything. Keep an open mind and you'll figure out when those times are.

Having said that, perl can be a complex language, even in a single line of code. You can do many things in many ways. I would suggest picking up the O'reilly Camel book (Programming Perl) and the perl cookbook.

The first will give you base knowledge of how things work. Most of the text can be found in the man pages, but I find the book organized in a way that you have your introduction, a big piece of meat of information, and a good index. Just remember not to get stuck on one thing if you can find another way of doing it. functions like map, foreach and simple for loops can all be used to accomplish the same thing.

The perl cookbook is great because there are a lot of solutions to common problems. Aside from preventing you from doing really BAD things, it promotes doing neat things and learning "how stuff works". My favourite, before I really thought about it, was creating a mathematical set w/ no dupes. There is a way of finding such a set from a larger set in the cookbook, which is short and easy to understand, but the idea of a computer science dictionary (the abstract structure) and a hash (perl's popular name for it) never quite registered. So here I would be trying to do thigns the hard way, using standard arrays. Glad I never got that chance :)

Anyway.. stick around as well, you'll find that people ask really silly quesions with short answers, and really strange ones that will confuse you on "why they'd wanna do that anyway". You'll learn a lot. And never be afraid to ask questions of the monks and your peers. Providing they aren't google'able questions, we are all willing to help.


Play that funky music white boy..

In reply to Re: OT: Switching Sides by exussum0
in thread OT: Switching Sides by Khansultant

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