And now that I've said that, I'd personally recommend you do not learn perl 5. Barring a couple highly targeted bouts of insanity, Perl 6 is going to make it look like TCL.

First of all, the project is nothing nerfarious. I kept the first note short to save y'all time.

I inherited the code from someone else who is not so motivated to help me understand it. So, my main job is to just get it up and running and to understand it is further down the list. This would seem to preclude going to Perl 6. I did notice a .NET extension of perl out there. I have not gotten to the point of looking into that. But, I have other code coming to evaluated which is .NET and so this intrigued me. Any comments on that (if you know what it is).

The code I got is a web crawler (but only with permisson!). As I mentioned, I am a long time C/C++ programmer and I have seen these kinds of things before. I have just mostly done them on Windows and not Linux or other flavors of unix, so some of the configuration stuff has got me bogged down (although I know unix shell OK). The "documentation" says it's using

And that is about the extent of the docs :-). I seem to have gotten all the libs installed. I found inside and started to figure that out. I am putting this all on my Windows XP machine (where I have been using .NET) and IIS. This might be a problem. Aside from the biases you might hold near and dear, perl doesn't seem to like Win32 too much, me thinks. I think i may be better off with Apache, for example.

I have been having trouble now with some missing modules which seem to be installed but are not found (more on that later). I found DBI on CPAN (MYSQL Drivers) but it wanted ppm to install and I cannot seem to get ppm to work. Ugh. Installs and tests etc. seem to go OK for the most part, although its hard to decide if a "skipped test" is critical. I must admit to having given up rather easily on this problem and decided to go back to the books since I have no clue as to what the monster is I have started to create, which has caused me to seek advice.

So, that seems to be all the details worth posting. I am now getting "insert user failed ($dbh doesn't appear to be defined)" on one of the apps. which appears to be related to my poor MySQL driver installation if you care to comment. Inside doesn't seem to show it but the CPAN download seems to indicate it's in there. But, I haven't gotten to the point of quite figuring that all out. I am trying to understand the architecture of the whole thing now since it's not going to just work with one pull on the starter cord :-)

One observation: it seems that there are dozens (lots of, many, more than one) of implementations out there (in CPAN, at least). This seems like a good thing but is rather daunting at first. What other tools do you recommend for manging experimenting with all these things? (other than inside which I already found).

Thanks much, cheers

In reply to Re: Newbie Ramping up on a big project by Lowell
in thread Newbie Ramping up on a big project by Anonymous Monk

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.