Mikeraz...

Firstly, congratulations! Secondly however, PerlMonks may surely take some sort of offence that you are leaving behind your Perl programs for "more interesting work"...

The real issue though is not the choice of programming language, but your company's rather "amateur" approach to designing and developing inhouse code. By implication of your predicament, you appear to be the only one capable of supporting these Perl programs but the issue is only raised when you leave. You don't specify if these were business critical scripts, but what happened previously when you where on holiday and a problem arose, what contingency was in place if you were hit by the proverbial bus? Recommendations to your boss for co-workers to learn Perl are somewhat short-sighted in that (a) your co-workers are likely to be somewhat put out by having to take on that level of commitment to learn and then support (ie. be responsible if it goes wrong) and (b) you may learn Perl but to support someone else's code requires a large amount of sundialvc4's "designer's intent". Maybe a more valuable recommendation to your boss would be that he adopt a better policy on development that allows some resilience against disease, pestilence, sloath, head-hunters and large metal objects travelling a bit too fast. Offering short-term support (or education) to maintain the scripts is honourable but probably not something that will enamour yourself to your new boss (your time is his money) especially as at the end of the day, this is not really your problem anymore.

To answer your original question though, if people are to learn, it doesn't really matter where they learn from as long as they're interested in doing so. As a support team for a mid-sized US company, we chose to standardise of Perl and we've taught ourselves from books and examples of other people's hard graft. As a team we now all support each other and share our best Perl bits for re-use. I've found the SAMS "Teach Yourself Perl in 24hrs" (Clinton Pierce ISBN 0-672-32276-5) a constant companion in refreshing the basics, with a copy of the "Perl Cookbook" (ISBN 0-596-00313-7) sitting next to it have been all I've needed. With Mr Google and the PerlMonks at the end of a mouse click, you've probably got all you need go.

Whatever, good luck with the new job!

Soprano

In reply to Re: A reasonable approach to getting a Perl skill foundation? by soprano
in thread A reasonable approach to getting a Perl skill foundation? by mikeraz

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