I would second Fastolfe's recommendation. The cookbook is well worth the money - I have found several suggestions there that have prevented me frompulling out my hair. | [reply] |
Thank you, Maclir, and Fastolfe. Mostly, I appreciate the vote of confidence, as I'm sitting here, pulling my hair out. I do have this book, and refer to it (and others) frequently. You probably think that I'm an idiot after that statement, but let me explain. I am a network engineer for a very large ISP/E-business hosting provider. I have never programmed a line of code, prior to about a month ago. Frankly, I prefer net eng work. When I started this contract, I was very honest about what I knew and what I didn't know. And programming was specifically discussed during my interviews. Well, one day, my supervisor cxalls me in his office and says, "Steve, let's test out your programming skills." At this point I'm scratching my head. So, he gave me a spec, and I obsessed on it for a couple of days, and apparently he was impressed. Now, for some reason, I am "tool developer" for my group! My point is, that while I am learning at quite a rapid pace, I'm learning in sort of a fragmented fashion. In other words, I know bits and pieces, thus far. Most of the time, the examples in the Cookbook make sense to me. SOmetimes, they are close to what I need, and I just don't have the knowledge to manipulate the examples to do exactly what I need. Some of the books that I have, have exercises at the end of each chapter, to reinforce what has been taught in the preceding chapter. I wish that I had the luxury of methodically, reading each chapter and doing the exercises. But, unfortunately, since I am learning as I am producing production code, actual programming has to take precedence. I'll say it again; I am deeply indebted to you folks here, who have helped me out.
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I found it useful to actually just go through and read the book. Throughout the recipies, lots of Perl tricks and shortcuts are used (and occasionally documented), and I think to myself, "that sure is a nifty way of doing that sort of thing," even though it has little to do with the actual problem they're discussing. That's what I meant.
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