Hey Tom,

No, no. I didn't mean it like:
"Hey before you go off into the mountains for a year with nothing but a crate of creamed corn and Tang to learn Perl, here is what you need to know." Although, that would be pretty fun to see what would happen. (For someone else I mean-not me.)

OK, this is somewhat more what I meant.

I have always felt that taking up different things at the same time that — on the surface — don't have much to do with one another can end up having a sort-of cross fertilization effect.

For example:
In this first year I took up learning the blues harmonica at the same time as Perl. (It's not going as well though.) I continue to draw, shoot photos and design since that's my profession. My wife and I have traveled twice which is something we love to do. I have read a bunch of books which mostly didn't have to do with Perl. I also started cooking more again and finally managed NOT to kill a plant. I think on various levels learning Perl can influence and be influenced by all of these.

A direct example of Perl and a life experience helping one another:
My wife and I have been working towards the possibility of adopting a child. It's an intimidating and complicated process. This is not helped by the fact that my wife and I address grown up problems differently at times. We went about researching, brainstorming and doing soul searching both together and individually. At one point I thought "Too bad I don't know Perl a little better. I'd come up with a module for this whole tangled mess." I did, however use the opportunity to take our lists and use them as data to learn hashes and arrays. :-)

So, yes I do think life experiences can help you before and during time spent learning Perl.


"...the adversities born of well-placed thoughts should be considered mercies rather than misfortunes." — Don Quixote

In reply to Re^2: What should you know before you start to learn Perl? by luis.roca
in thread What should you know before you start to learn Perl? by luis.roca

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.