Learning Perl is something that suited me really well at the time I was doing it, but that was fifteen years after finishing my engineering degree. If you get good at Perl, I'm guessing first year in Comp Sci is going to seem kinda stoopid because you'll be using simpler languages that don't have as many cool features as Perl.

Having said that, Perl (and this terrific community) will help you sharpen your programming chops before school starts -- and I'm defining programming as developing, testing and deploying software here .. and I should probably throw in documentation and support too.

You'll probably want to cross-train -- develop some of your own code, but also install some CPAN modules and read through some of the code and see how it's done. Get used to the debugging tools -- I use the Perl debugger when I can, or Log::Log4perl otherwise -- so that when you need them, you'll have those tools to hand right away.

And visit Perlmonks often, reading lots and lots of nodes -- there are all kinds of nuggets here and there. And, of course, ask questions if you get stuck -- I've been using Perl ten years now and I'm still learning bits and pieces. I learn a lot just by browsing through all of the cool nodes here at the Monastery.

Nope -- structured learning isn't really that important -- just a sharp mind and an inquisitive soul. A sense of humour helps too. :)

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

In reply to Re: Structured Learning of Perl, Important or Not? by talexb
in thread Structured Learning of Perl, Important or Not? by koolgirl

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