I've just been curious. I know there is a huge range of perl experience and knowledge (not necessarily the same thing) here in the monastery.

For me, it was about two years ago now. I was doing some volunteer work for a students' society, and they wanted to look into online voting. I whipped up a quick and dirty cgi script to handle taking the votes and keeping track of who had voted. I did it with one flat file for the votes and one dbm file for tracking who had voted. I'm surprised that the damn thing works, now that I look back at it.

I'm embarassed to admit it, but, there was no taint checking, or warnings or strict. I didn't use CGI. Now that I think back to it, there was one hell of a race condition (all the votes were going into one flat file) that never even occured to me. Then again, I didn't know anything about databases, DBI, or even unix. It was an interesting project, that taught me the very basics of perl syntax.

Perl 4 syntax actually.

I am very happy about how my perl ability has grown over the last two years. And, I think I owe a lot of it to PerlMonks, and Ovid's CGI course.

In reply to What got you interested in Perl? by coolmichael

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.