I think that we have better ways of teaching new Perl programmers now. When I started, I got "Learning CGI Programming with Perl in 21 Days". I don't recommend this book to anyone. If I ever find where I put my copy, I will likely burn it in effigy. Though it got me started in Perl, it also took years before I shed myself of its bad habits.

These days, we can point new programmers to some of merlyn's books. Many of the entry-level classes for Perl are teaching 'use strict' as if it's what you always put at the top of every Perl file along with the shebang line.

After those initial classes, though, there's still a big learning curve. They'll have a better start than I did, but most places that write good Perl code still wouldn't hire them, simply because those places know that they can only hire the top 10%.

That's a huge problem, and I'm honestly at a loss on how to solve it. The best solution I've come up with is to get hired by a company that has garbage Perl code, hang around PerlMonks a lot, and then jump ship to a good company as soon as they can. But that seems like a cop-out solution.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

In reply to Re: Where are future senior programmers coming from? by hardburn
in thread Where are future senior programmers coming from? by tilly

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