My journey through perl at this point has been purely theoretical. Read the Camel, read the Ram, examined favorite modules, helped at perlmonks. But now, I feel that there is a next step that I need to complete to truly increase my perl capabilites.

I need to solve a real world problem.

I am really of the opinion that an essential part of programming is the examination of a situation, coming up with an analysis of the problem and finally beginning to undertake a solution. My life does not allow me to earn money by solving problems with perl; jobs which many of you are lucky enough to have. I think that I'm at a dead end, and I suspect that their are other novices of perl who feel stuck at this particular point.

Certainly, I could make up a problem for myself and solve it, but this always seems like "practice" to me for when the real problems actually come. But they never do.

A concrete example might help. When I earlier was examining the node Summarizing an array of IP's I said to myself, You could probably write a script/module which would handle the general case of this problem which would create a cute little organized data structure for input like this. And while such an excercise might be wholesome, it would still be just that, an excercise. Never would anyone have a need for this type of functionality, and it certainly wouldn't make the world a better place. And if it was something that was interesting or useful, someone would have undoubtedly put it on CPAN already.

My question, then, is how can I get unstuck and begin to "learn by doing"? I'm getting past the point where I can do excercises for the benifit of learning a new construct, but I'm not experienced enough to begin to solve real-world problems which haven't been already solved by the much more accomplished. Can we novices hope to find a niche to test our new-found teeth on some real programming? Or are we doomed to a life of Comp. Sci. 101 excercises until we get us a nice computer job?




Thanks for the input.


Who is Kayser Söze?
Code is (almost) always untested.

In reply to Learning by Doing by jweed

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