I'd like to hear how other Perl monks discovered the language as my road to Perl was a little indirect.

I was coding front end web pages with HTML, CSS & Javascript and gravitated to Dreamweaver 4 for most of the work. It had a search and replace tool which I thought was pretty neat in those days but to use the advanced options you had to know this mini-language called 'regular expressions'. I was directed to Jeffrey Friedl's authoritative "Mastering Regular Expressions" and soon realised that Perl was THE language for wielding this potent tool. I realised I needed to make the decision to learn a 'real' programming language but part of me was convinced that there was a brighter future in learning Java. Soon I had books on Java and Perl before me but there was only room for one language as I'm a slow learner.

The battle raged for about a month during which I was slogging away with the ugly Java Swing library and AWT by day and relaxing with Larry Wall's "Programming Perl" by night. I soon realised that I was looking forward to the evening sessions with Larry Wall as a release from the tedium of banging my head against the brick wall of Java. Perl was fun.

So, the Java books were eventually put to one side and began gathering dust. The bookshelves have gradually filled with Perl titles and I enjoy the culture which is unique to Perl. Emacs also replaced Dreamweaver eventually but that's another story

In reply to Roads to Perl by gunzip

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