matze77 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Monks!
I worked through some of the Tutorials in the section.
But i feel i need a solid base - a head start -from where its easier for me to do research on my own, teach myself.
I wonder what you think of Perl Trainings (online), since i am not able to visit a "Personal on-site" Training for a few months now.
Or perhaps you have seen some screencasts (english or german)
I was looking around for some online courses and found this at oreillys:
http://oreillyschool.com/courses/asac4/syllabus.php
What do you think is it worth the money (398$)?

This thread is some years back, so maybe some things discussed here already changed meanwhile:
Perl Training

Update:
Perl Videos? thanks zod

Perl Training pdfs:
http://perltraining.com.au/notes.html
thanks almut
/Update

btw: I ordered the Camel Book.

Update:
I found another invaluable book on my shelf:
Mastering Regular Expressions,3rd rev. by Jeffrey Friedl
Which i think every unix/linux admin should have regardless of using Perl.
Mastering Regular Expressions
/Update
Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts.

Would it have been better to post this in meditations section?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Perl Training online courses?
by CountZero (Bishop) on Nov 29, 2008 at 14:16 UTC
    Everyone will have its own idea on this issue. I learned Perl on my own with the Camel book and Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours and just starting to use Perl. This doesn't necessarily make you a good programmer and I had ot unlearn a lot of "bad" habits later, but it got the job done. And over the years you pick-up better techniques and get to know the language better.

    The nice thing about Perl is that you can go a long way without mastering the language fully: e.g. for years I hardly ever used grep or map (and then map mostly in a void context), now there is hardly a script I write which does not use these functions.

    Hanging out on Perlmonks is a wonderful experience and really kicked my coding into a higher gear.

    But as they say : YMMV

    When for the price of a few hundred dollars you can quickly improve your coding skills and get a better job, I think it is worth the price. However I personally doubt that a video or online course will do better than a book. In the end it is still you that has to do the coding, so just start coding!

    CountZero

    A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

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Re: Perl Training online courses?
by almut (Canon) on Nov 29, 2008 at 14:28 UTC

    Not sure if that's exactly what you're looking for (i.e. what degree of interactivity you desire, whether you're generally an autodidact, etc.), but Perl Training Australia have some good materials (including exercises — see Course Notes) available on-line as PDFs.

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Re: Perl Training online courses?
by zod (Scribe) on Nov 30, 2008 at 04:14 UTC
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      Ty. After more than 5 hours downloading and some breaks at my low-bandwith isdn connection ;-)
      at least the guy really amused me with his funny indian accent.
      Maybe this helps others with low bandwith conn: I download it with this permanent at a friends better connection: (paste the link to youtube there)
      http://keepvid.com
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Re: Perl Training online courses?
by Bloodnok (Vicar) on Nov 29, 2008 at 18:09 UTC
    I'm afraid I have no knowledge of perl training - whether on-line or not - so I'm afraid I have nothing to offer on that front and I would also be interested, from the point of view of perl evangelism, in the points of view of any other venerable perl sages out there.

    That being said, I came to perl from a systems programming/shell scripting background and IMO, an in-depth knowledge of regular expressions and shell scripting have proved invaluable in my, sadly all too slow, adoption of the language. I'm a firm believer in horses for courses and so I now still frequently exercise my shell scripting skills - alongside my, hopefully improving perl, skills dependant on the job in hand.

    I would recommend, in due course, obtaining the intermediate, advanced and 'references & objects' perl books to sit alongside the camel book on your bookshelf - or google for a publicly available perl CD bookshelf as I did (once I'd already bought the books).

    You've already done the best thing you could by joining this forum :-) I wish such a thing were available years ago - all that time I could've saved (..and probably spent in the pub:-))

    A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))
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      Thank you and all others for your replies.
      Anyway i think i give the oreilly school a try, it is 7 days you can test it ...
      I absoluletely agree with your praise for this site despite i am only a few days here but already think this forum invaluable, never seen such a well designed site, with so many experts around.
      The administrators aka gods do really a great job here too, thank you if you ever read this :-).
      I purchased "Learning Perl", waiting for delivery, after that worked through i try further books, like you mentioned (The documentation perldoc is really good but a little overwhelming for a beginner like me its not so easy to get an overview ;-)). Thanks for your advice in books too.
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        Absolutely no problem ... it's what this site (and AFAICT, the perl community at large) is all about.

        A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))
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