in reply to Learn Perl

Obviously, the answer is .. it depends.

You haven't said what you're studying, but if it's Computer Science or Software Engineering, you would do well to have a well-rounded education that includes various languages and technologies. For programming languages you should have experience using everything from assembler to C, Java, Python, PHP and Perl.

A variety of databases would be good as well -- I can recommend MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite and perhaps Oracle or DB2 depending on what's available to you. You should have experience with Windows and several variants of Unix/Linux, and also know something about TCP/IP and networking in general.

.NET is, I'm sure, a good language to learn, and I've seen some job ads requiring it, but I have no experience with it. This language does tie you to the Windows platform, but it's not a bad idea to spread your bets and learn technologies that exist outside Windows as well.

Perl's worked well for me -- it's a language I picked up on a whim over ten years ago and it's kept me employed since then. Works for me -- your mileage may vary.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

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

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Re^2: Learn Perl
by radiantmatrix (Parson) on Jun 13, 2008 at 20:13 UTC

    .NET is, I'm sure, a good language to learn, and I've seen some job ads requiring it, but I have no experience with it. This language does tie you to the Windows platform

    Two nitpicks:

    1. .NET is a platform, not a language. You can write .NET applications in C#, ASP, VisualBasic, etc.
    2. You aren't necessarily tied to Windows using .NET, thanks to the Mono Project. That said, getting support for .NET applications outside of Windows could be tricky.

    One of the things I like about Perl is how complete it's multi-platform support is:

    • The Perl interpreter works just about anywhere. Even on the iPhone...
    • Writing cross-platform apps is easy, thanks to things like File::Spec
    • There's a huge library of pre-existing, cross-platform solutions in the form of CPAN.

    Put succinctly, I guess I'd say it's the community, stupid! :)

    <–radiant.matrix–>
    Ramblings and references
    “A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” — Herm Albright
    I haven't found a problem yet that can't be solved by a well-placed trebuchet
[reply]

      Thanks for the feedback -- I didn't know that .NET is a platform. Obviously.

      The bigger problem I have is with Microsoft; I'm not happy with any supplier who decides, at their own convenience, that a pre-existing product will become unavailable after a certain date, or functionally hobbled somehow. That's why open source is great -- once you have the source code for something, you are free to do whatever you want.

      And Perl, as you said, has this amazing community that is available to you for feedback, help, suggestions, whatever you need. Awesome.

      Alex / talexb / Toronto

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

[reply]

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