Can we novices hope to find a niche to test our new-found teeth on some real programming? Or are we doomed to a life of Comp. Sci. 101 excercises until we get us a nice computer job?
For one, you can continue reading the site. The IP question was simple, yes, but there are also more in-depth questions like, should i use MVC with HTMl::Template, Mason or something else. Learn the technologies and do easy large things to get the gist of what to do, what can be done.. and so on. The difference between a real world problem and a scienific one is just vested interest.

For instance.. writing a GPA calculator might be a silly exercise, but a lot of college sites have them. Would a GPA calculator be easy to write? Sure. You take in a bunch of inputs, you do some math, you pop out a number. You validate and do a bit of checking... it can't be more than 50 lines long.. maybe 100. But point is, someone will ask for it.

Now think of something that queries a database, formats the information into a pdf (nicely) and puts it on a server somewhere. Companies do this every day for reporting purposes.

The only thing that makes real world problems hard, are those little things that make people happy. "I don't like how long this takes." "Can you make this do this behavior instead." It's not limited to perl either. Knowing how to do anything in any language adds to your toolkit of things you can do. Just a matter of knowing how to tweak those things to make people happy.


Play that funky music white boy..

In reply to Re: Learning by Doing by exussum0
in thread Learning by Doing by jweed

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