I don't think you or BUU are missing anything except the perspective of the newly arrived immigrant. Perl has a great doc base but I didn't know about any of it till I'd been coding perl for almost a year. It's nobody's fault, it's that Perl attracts those who don't have a programming background. Many of the hackers here are computer scientists and engineers but a lot of the hackers in perl at large are English majors, designers, linguists, biologists, etc who, being self-taught, may well have never heard of "man" or "perldoc" and don't know where to turn for help besides the top matches on Google for perl like, unfortunately, Matt's Script Archive.
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You say "top matches on google", but when I do a search for "perl" on google just now, my top matches are:
- Perl.com
- Perl.org
- Cpan
- Activestate
- Perldoc.com
All of which have links to online documentation. Are these links not good enough? Are they hard to find?
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Yeah, you make a good point and I shouldn't have glossed over that. Those sites, for the most part, are irrelevant and opaque to a beginner. (I don't think perldoc.com existed when I started or I would've glommed right onto it but only if I'd know what "perldoc" meant to begin with; I use it today to keep version differences straight b/t work and home.)
Few of the major docs or sites are aimed at beginners or newcomers to programming; after all, how do you explain pack to a non-programmer? Again, I think this is testament to what a wide and open appeal Perl holds; as well as how approachable it is. I've tried teaching myself some C and Lisp, among other things, from public docs and tutorials and Perl is a cake-walk by comparison. The docs are opaque and slippery for beginners, though, and people who come to Perl from C or Java or whatever don't/can't really see it. I'm not criticizing--the quality of the docs you get for free is immense--just giving the perspective of the BA side of the fence.
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