Re: Helping Perl converts

The Library contains an almost complete reference to the Perl language.
check this for Perl traps to avoid when coming from other languages
And use Super Search, looking for "Perl advocacy", "The Spirit of Perl", "thoughts on programming", "Why use perl?" (especially this one)
Then a visit to the Monastery's Reviews will give you an idea of what to read to start.
My personal choice is the Camel book, but I know that many people would rather start with the Llama book or "Perl: How to program"
As for giving a complete guide on how to migrate from a language to another, I'll give you my personal view on this subject. Perl is a language for explorers. It can fullfill your needs even if you baby-talk it. But if you want to be proficient, you need to be curious and search for the resources that are available in the Perl community, (Starting from here). While this statement could be true for many programming languages, Perl is special, because it was free and open before the Open Source concept was even created and has been breathing around free documentation for very long time. Therefore, if you are conducting a restless quest for the perfect tool, finding Perl will be an epiphany. And if you are really thirsty for knowledge, the Monastery's "Super Search" will be your best friend for at least one month.
So, back to my personal view, I think that a good candidate for a Perl programmer needs only a couple of GOOD links to warm up. After all, if (s)he has arrived here, it's an excellent starting point.
As a last meditation, I leave you with some thoughts from davorg on Perl advocacy :-)

update The joking nature of the latest remark might have been misinterpreted. I should always remember to put some smileys \:->

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Re: Re: Helping Perl converts by davorg (Chancellor) on Jan 08, 2002 at 20:05 UTC
Er... I should probalby point out that the article that gmax points to was a joke. Please don't think I really believe that. -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> "The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club." -- Chip Salzenberg	[reply]
Re: Re: Helping Perl converts by robot_tourist (Hermit) on Jan 08, 2002 at 18:35 UTC
I understand what you and davorg are saying, but I still don't think it unreasonable to have a section in the Tutorial pages for existing programmers who know how to do something in C++ for example and the page says how to do it in Perl. Curiousness is one thing, but a single reference page can be handy. Possibly this is too simple an example, but if you started off in Java and learnt that string concatenation done with the '+' operator, you need to know that the string concatenator in Perl is '.'. Yes, that was a very, very simple example, but I hope you know what I mean. One column, with, e.g. linked lists in C++ and the other with how it's done in Perl, with a link to perlref/bot/lol or whichever for the why. I would think of it like a faq. As a busy monk, you don't want to answer a whole lot of questions you've already answered, but you still want to help. I have a wiry brain/each eye a camera	[reply]
Re (tilly) 3: Helping Perl converts by tilly (Archbishop) on Jan 08, 2002 at 19:37 UTC
I strongly suspect that by the time a programmer from another language learned enough about Perl to find this site, and then enough about this site to find that tutorial, they would have (hopefully) learned how to handle most of the obvious translations. However don't let that dissuade you. If you think there is something of value here, write it. If it is generally well-written, informative and addresses a clear target audience, it has every chance of being accepted as a tutorial.	[reply]