I'm not sure what I would call essential, but I know what's high on my list right now. Following Tom Christiansen's observation (quoted by tilly here) that:

[a] programmer who hasn't been exposed to all four of the imperative, functional, objective, and logical programming styles has one or more conceptual blindspots. It's like knowing how to boil but not fry. Programming is not a skill one develops in five easy lessons.
I decided to broaden my horizons by (re)learning Scheme, which I haven't used at all since my undergraduate days. Maybe Prolog next, on the "logical programming" front (though I'm open to suggestions). Or Haskell. Or Eiffel. Sheesh. OK, what the heck, SNOBOL too.

I also want to spend some quality time with the Perl internals, but I confess that waiting for "the other shoe to drop" with Perl 6 saps some of the motivation.

Friedel's book on regular expressions has been on my to-read list for a while (but if I heed Mugatu's reply to my last meditation, maybe it should stay there for a bit longer).

I must say, however, and I mean this very sincerely, reading PM is for me the most effective way to sharpen my Perl and my programming. Hardly a day goes by that I don't learn something extremely useful here. So much of programming seems to be a matter of small little tricks and bits and pieces of knowledge (the name of a built-in function or of a CPAN module or of a Unix utility) that do not fit into some grand over-arching scheme. Bags of tricks, basically. Of course, bags of tricks don't lend themselves as the basis for university classes and best-selling books (though O'Reilly's hacks series is challenging that); next to face-to-face exchange with co-workers and other programmers, a place like PM is the best medium for this sort of knowledge, IMO.

the lowliest monk

In reply to Re: Perl in Mind by tlm
in thread Perl in Mind by artist

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.