Outside of earning a living as a programmer, one of my interests is to be a handyman/carpenter, and hangout in the likes of HomeDepot. Everyone in the handyman profession always has a toolbox that almost defines who they are. I'm wondering what each of you consider a must in your software toolbox. Please note the word "must", which really means those without which your job will suffer, not impossible. Archimedes used to say: "Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world." I'm looking for a list so that I can say: "Give me a place to sit and with this list I will program the whole world."

My list is as follows:

• An editor: emacs
• A version control system: CVS
• A shell: Bash, shell scripts
• Perl: For anything too much for a shell script. (Here I'm putting perl as a tool, even though the actual job might be in, say, java.)

Since many of us also use perl for web applications, what is a good list for a perl oriented web programmer:

• CGI.pm (for the simple and the quick)
• CGI::Applications (for the more complicated)
• ??? (is there an enterprise level web framework? whatever that means?)
• mod_perl
• Template Toolkit
• WWW::Mechanize (for testing)

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.