At my last job, i was assigned a project that was very much classified as network programming - and i did it in Perl. Now i have a new job, and whereas i can't say that i will ever write a network application for the company, i can say that i am glad i have a bit of experience in the area.

I forsee a lot of Python and Java in my future . . . so I bought Java Network Programming. As for Java network programming, it's a bunch of classes that abstract everything down to streams and filters. For me, that's boring, but it does lend to rapid application developement for medium to large size teams.

If you are worried that learning how to program networking applications in Perl is a waste of time and effort - DON'T!

The Perl way is closer to the actual guts of networking than Java, which abstracts the details away. Here is an example, it takes about 5 times as many lines to open a pipe to a system call and dump the output to STDOUT in Java than it does Perl. You have to create a stream object, attempt to open it via exceptions, create another stream object, possibly a filter object, catch them in exceptions . . . so on.

My advice - learn the Perl way (which is just a minor abstraction from the C way), and then learn the Java way if you think it will add value to your skill set.

The more ways you know, the better.

Jeff

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