Years ago I discovered Perl and I was fascinated enough to decide I had to learn it. So I printed all the manual pages and started reading them. The problem was that I did not own any computer at this time. So my method of learning was purely theoretical: it only consisted in reading books.

I can tell you this method did not work. After a few months, I forgot most of what I thought I learnt. Later I also had to learn stupid things such as MS languages and other proprietary stuff. All very boring and tedious work/studies activities that distracted me away from interesting programming languages.

It's only years later, quite recently actually, when I had my own computer with a free and open source operating system, and also when I had lots of free time and an internet connection, that I could "re-discover" perl and really start to learn it.

Only then I could seriously start to learn it (and I still have much to learn). The difference was that I then had personal computing projects, stuff I could test my knowledge on.

So I think that to learn a programming language, you must find a balance between theory and practice. Reading documentation is as important as doing some actual coding, preferably on a project you feel passionate about (it's better for motivation).

I don't think I could tell anything else about this subject. I hope it'll be useful.

In reply to Re: What is the best way to master perl by grondilu
in thread What is the best way to master perl by 5plit_func

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.