Re: Re: The Gates of Perl are not newbie friendly.

[Hielo]

This is a response to Louis Wu Also, as both of you were asking about what I have already read.

I am in the middle of reading Learning Perl, and it is a great read, not what I expected from a programming tome, I am coing off of reading Perl for Dummies (and yes, I do feel like a dummy for buying it...)

I am going to have a week free (my wife and kids are going to Puerto Rico, I elected to stay home and crack the books, does that make me an even bigger dummy?) and have decided that I will at least be able to understand the concepts that are obvious in Perl by that time.
I bought a number of books to get me started, Learning Perl, Core Perl little black book, Programming Perl,Begining Perl, Perl and CGI (whoops, almost as bad as the dummies book!) and a few others that I have yet to recieve.

I got myself a subscription to Active State and sprung for the Komodo IDE, and I even got a subscription to The Perl Journal. All in the space of a week and a half.

Now I have to start using these resources, I just wondered if instead of spending the $500.00 or so, if there was a simple guide,that held my hand and walked me through the initial learning curve.

I am getting back into programming after a 10 year hiatus (two kids, I am a stay at home Dad), the last programming language I learned (and I knew it inside and out) was a obscure language for a now defunt Bulletin Board System called PCBoard, the language was PPL.

. Thanks for the suggestions guys, I will follow each link, and see what i can squeeze from it, learning Perl is a goal I have to sort of get myself used to not doing the child rearing thing. It has to be easier <s>.

Keep the suggestion coming if you think of anything else, something has to click.

[pfaut]

You mention CGI - although perl is very good for developing CGI applications, I would not recommend it until you get a better understanding of how perl works. CGI programs are notoriously difficult to debug. If you throw a beginner's understanding of the language and CGI programming together, you're likely to become extremely frustrated as you try to figure out how to figure out why your program doesn't work. Unless you have a very good understanding of how your webserver and CGIs work and how to debug them, I would recommend putting your efforts into getting things to work from the command line first and only moving on to CGI after becoming comfortable with the language.

90% of every Perl application is already written. ⇒

dragonchild

[Hielo]

I agree 100%, I have decided that I will take the next month, and learn the very basics of Perl, basic input&output stuff, get that so I know the inside of it as well as the outsides, after that I will add a bit of the more esoteric stuff, Databases and the such.

Problem is, my wife has a website she wants to setup for her business, and wants me to do it. My HTML skills are mediocre at best <s>, but I know enough to get it rolling. What I want to do on it is pretty specific and I have much of it plotted out, I only have to get up to speed on perl to bring it together.

CGI will have to wait, though there is a very interesting module (can you belive I am still trying to figure modules out, getting them, getting them installed...) that I am dieing to use, and I have spent the better part of the past two days smashing my head up againt it.

. I am going to use that module as the stepping stone from not knowing modules to actually knowing them <s>.

Thanks for the encouragement!

[demerphq]

A couple of comments: Unlike some others I dont think you went that wrong with the Komodo and the AS support. I personally have them and dont use them much, but I've also seen others with some basic familiarity with other languages use them to come up to speed in perl quite quickly. And frankly for learning/debugging regexes the AS stuff rocks big time. However, you should also install a "normal" AS perl longside that. Eventaully you'll probably switch to using it with a text editor, but for the first while the komodo i think will be comforting.

The normal install comes with a great indexed HTML version of all the standard docs (similar to perldoc.com or the CPAN sites or whatnot). I personally often have three or four browsers open to various pages. For you I would suggest reading perlsyn and a quick glance through perlfunc along side a good read of perlboot perltoot and perltootc. Some may wonder at the later, as they are OO oriented, but personally I found them to be excellent general perl documents that shine just enough light in enough corners that you can get moving quite quickly with just reading them. Even if you dont write a module or class for weeks after reading them, the general exposure will do wonders.

Learning perl is meant to be a fairly smooth and gradual process. The language is designed so that "baby-perl" works but "adult-perl" is possible. So considering you probably have a basic idea of program flow control and the like the best thing to do is to write a project. Every time you say to yourself "theres gotta be a better way to do this" have a poke through the docs, odds are you'll find that you were right. OTOH, if it works dont worry about it, move on the next program. :-) Everybody has the horror story about "their first perl program /brrr" :-)

Oh and youve already done IMO one of the best things you could have done to learn Perl. You've showed up here and asked a reasonable question. You'd be suprised how many people dont get that far ;-)

Good luck.


---
demerphq

<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...

---

• Update:  
I also strongly encourage you to read anything in the standard docs that has "tut" or "toot" in it. There are a few, and you should at least be familiar with them and the areas they cover so that when you wonder "how do I do X" you know which document to look into. Simply knowing most of their names helps a great deal :-)

[Popcorn Dave]

A friend of mine, during an employment hiatus of his own doing, worked through a copy of Perl in 21 Days. He had a good programming background in other languages to start, but said that was a good book for him. Your mileage may vary.

That said, as others have said, there are wonderful tutorials here and wonderful people here who have assisted many, including me, in times of "bang head here over problem".

One book I can heartily recommend is Coriolis's Perl Black Book. Great reference for when you can't remember that niggling little syntax detail.

As far as comparing child rearing and Perl, I can tell you that Perl is easier than getting a cat to do what you say. :)

Good luck!

There is no emoticon for what I'm feeling now.

[Hielo]

I will go out and grab a copy of "Perl in 21 Days", one thing I can not have enough of is more books. <s>

I have on order the Perl Black Book, I should see it in a day or two. Still getting through Learning Perl, I don't know if it is the first book a rank amateur ought to start with, it jumps into scalars and hases without much warning. A few chapters with "This is print", over and over, then a few more with "This is Print with a control character" is what I am looking for <s>.

. Thanks for the recommendations!

[Anonymous Monk]

worked through a copy of Perl in 21 Days.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Is it the language specification, the source code, or a book (Programming Perl/Learning Perl)? If it's Learning Perl that's only about 300 pages and can be read on a weekend, if it's Programming Perl, why would someone read it straight through? (I did, it wasn't worth it, better off as a reference book).

[bart]

It's a book with the title "(Teach Yourself) Perl in 21 Days". See here and here.

[Anonymous Monk]

Hello and welcome back :)

I got myself a subscription to Active State and sprung for the Komodo IDE, and I even got a subscription to The Perl Journal.

I hate to break it to you, but in my humble opinion all of the above are a total waste of money. I don't have a very high opinion of the perl journal, and I can definately say it isn't great for those just getting into Perl. As for fancy IDEs and subscriptions to Active State, you'd be better off without them. All they do is serve as roadblocks to learning.

I just wondered if instead of spending the $500.00 or so, if there was a simple guide,that held my hand and walked me through the initial learning curve.

Definately. In fact there are several extremely good resources. The obvious one is where you're currently posting. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the documentations with Perl is just about the best I've seen with any language (and its free). It may look very overwhelming at first, but break into into bite-sized chunks (start with perlintro, work your way up), and it's easy to swallow. The other excellent resource I can think of is safari, they have an awesome selection of Perl books (all the essentials, and almost all the ones even worth reading) and it's extremely cost-effective, check it out.

Also, I'd recommend against going out and buying 5 books at a time on any subject unless you're an extremely fast speed reader being thrown into solitary for a couple weeks. You'll always end up regretting some of the purchases. Personally out of the over 100 programming books I've bought, I'm glad I bought about 5 of them. Better off to look for online resources, then if necessary pick up a book or two afterwards.

Good luck! :)