How I learned (and continue to learn) Perl/CGI:

Thinking they were for advanced users/programming professionals only, I was a bit intimidated by O'Reilly books. Instead a bought Laura LeMay's "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days". My first lesson from this book was that THERE IS NO FUCKING WAY YOU CAN LEARN PERL IN 21 DAYS! Yes, you can get a good, strong foundation in that time but that is about all. The title of the book is nothing but a bad marketing ploy.

Anyway, I digress. The book was just what I needed to get my feet wet. LeMay is an excellent writer. She really knows how to anticipate what the reader is thinking and what the reader wants to know. Also, the book is written for the newbie. I strongly recommend this book to newbies. It's definitely the book if you need your hand held. Just don't try to adhere to the ridiculous 21 day schedule or you will probably come out clueless on the other side.

Of course the book does have it's problems. There are numerous typos in the example code. Also, the book glosses over more advanced functions and techniques. For me, this is where the O'Reilly books came into play. A few weeks ago, I purchased the O'Reilly 6 book Perl set (only $60 for 6 O'Reilly books!) they publish on CD-ROM. I now use this resource when I want to look up info on more advanced topics. I still find the writing in them a bit more cryptic, but far more accurate and concise (sometimes LeMay was a bit too wordy).

About 1 month ago (and about 1 month into my journey) I was lucky enough to discover PerlMonks. Needless to say, it's been a great resource. I quickly discovered that you could actually get intelligent answers to a posted question here and so I knew that PM was a special kind of community. I've donated $10 and bought a t-shirt. I encourage you to do the same. Keep this community alive if you found that it has helped you:

Visit the offering plate

PerlMonks has helped me in two critical ways. First, the friendly people here have given technical assistance with code that has stumped me. They've also pointed me in the right direction with reference to Perldoc. From them, I learned that Perldoc could acutally be useful. When I first looked at it, it was nothing but gibberish. The second thing I've taken away from PM is the culture that surrounds Perl and the programming community. I'm more of a computer hobbyist and could only guess as to what it was like out there in the "real" world. I now have a better feel for what the landscape is like.

But just put all the above aside for a minute. The real reason I think I've been pretty successful at learning Perl is my unwavering drive to learn it. I spent hours upon hours upon hours almost every day reading, playing with code on my server, and writing my own basic scripts. This kind of diligence is the number one ingredient. What I lack in a natural programming talent, I've made up for with pure brute strength. So far it seems to be paying off.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar";
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;