I think this article is an excellent *stub* for the theme:-). "Part one" sounds very encouraging though.
I'd be pleased to see a much bigger (and preferably categorized) list of common beginner's pitfalls. It would be only fare to point novice Perl developers to such list *before* they even start developing (maybe it'd force some not to start with Perl at all afterwords; but it's fair, isnt' it?..:-)). It's hard to overestimate a value of such a list, if it were comprehensive and systematical.

Please don't misinterpret me: although i don't normally use Perl for developing and it usually makes me very unhappy, I am not trying to start yet another "Horses Vs. Cows" war here:). My point is: all beginners make and will make tons of same mistakes; people should know what they are about to face and be aware that learning Perl to a dergee of not making these mistakes anymore is a comparatively big learning curve.

Out of the three mistakes described here in the article, I think only 1st one really belongs to the "Common *Perl* mistakes" category.
2) Repetition without Abstraction: it's a generic ugly coding practice problem; I don't see what it has to do with Perl. I mean, people who write like this will write like this in any language; and vice versa: people who don't in other langauage, won't in Perl either.
3) is common sense.

On the web, I also often see Perl idioms / general good practices mixed with "beginner's mistakes". Things like "Use "open or die" instead of "open"", "don't forget to print Content-type..." and xillions of others that have nothing to do with Perl.

But enough philosophyzing. I will now add a couple examples -- things that I stepped onto in my own practice -- as separate posts. That is, if I'm not moderated out of here...:-)

In reply to Re: Common Beginner Mistakes by Mabooka-Mabooka
in thread Common Beginner Mistakes by chromatic

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.