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I've been working with Perl under Win-NT (plus HP-UNIX and Linux) for over two years now, and i'ts almost as good as working with Perl under any UNIX dialect. Do not hesitate. Get the Activestate Perl and use it in production. It rocks more or less as well as any other Perl distribution.
You may find some parts of the language somewhat UNIX'ish, but don't fear. Even if you have no UNIX experience what so ever, you'll quickly get your mind set. (You may even grow some healthy curiosity for what UNIX does differently, and why. ;-)
Everything will go worng!
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I most definetely agree. I have been using perl on windows 2000 (and Linux, Solaris and even the old Rhapsody OS/X) in production environments for almost as long, and it is a beauty. For windows, it is very capable of taking the role as the system administration language, since DOS is severly lacking this ability for the most part. Then again, I use perl for almost all work on the other platforms nowadays too.
In short, perl can solve most problems for you, be it something that is supposed to run once every minute, or just a one-shot parsing of some odd file you need in some other format. It is also an easy language to get started on, since it tries to be "natural" and give you "the least surprise".
There might be a few tricks to running perl under windows, but thanks to above mentioned Activestate a lot of those are solved, mainly I could mention the hassle it can be to install some modules by hand, which Perl Package Manager takes care of for very many cases.
Since perl does a lot of stuff in a UNIX kind of way, and it still will work (mostly) on windows, you get a free chance to gain some understanding about that kind of OS's aswell, and since perl borrows a lot from lots of other languages, or has stuff in common with them, you also will have a good ground to stand on when you want to go learn the next language (and you will, if you like programming).
As for tips and tricks, and how to learn, get any recommended perl book. The differences are usually not that big, but you can pick up anyone you feel you like. Hang out in places like this one, other online resources and maybe you want to check out one or two of the mailing lists that are available to ask questions.
My best advice to learning however, is that as soon as you have succesfully started to run some examples from a book or tutorial, start doing something you would like to accomplish. This can be anything, I don't know... maybe you would like to go through your mp3 collection on your hard drive and produce a list of what you have? Try to use the documentation, your book(s), and online resources to figure out how to accomplish whatever it is. This is how most of us do work, only the really initiate know it all (or most) in their heads, we others learn how to search for the answer and apply it to whatever problem we are facing.
At least, this is how I learn best, and more or less how I started out in perl (and others, such as java).
Good luck!
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and just another that adds all types of unix'isms (including perl) to windows - cygwin
-derby | [reply] |
You might want to check out cygwin's
ports of perl, gcc and bash.
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If you are going to be doing a lot of development work you
might also want to consider getting a membership in
ASPN Perl, its initial cost appears high ~$495, but it
offers you online searchable access to nine of
the O'Reilly Books (Cookbook, Progamming, Learning, Advanced,
etc). It also gives you a license to use the
Komodo editor,
which is a nice editor that was designed for Perl code
from the start and offers a built in visual debugger.
Komodo Review
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