I learned Perl by:
- Staring at the manpage for Perl version 1
- Staring at the manpage for Perl version 2 (all 10 pages of it)
- Rewriting all my shell and emacs-lisp hacks as Perl
- Answering questions in comp.unix.shell with Perl
- Being on the alpha-test team for Perl version 3
- Reading through the updated manpages for version 3 very carefully
- Opening my mouth when Larry announced that he might write up some sort of additional documentation to say I'd help him with it, which eventually became the first Camel book
- Studying Perl very deeply inside and out while writing that first Camel
- Sending lots of emails to Larry
- Writing about Perl incorrectly, only to be corrected by Larry
- Writing a course for a california training company
- Presenting said course
- Turning the course into the first Llama book
- Creating a different course from the Llama book
- Presenting that course in front of tens of thousands of people over the years
- Turning that course and others like it into the world's leading on-site and open-enrollment training company
- Studying the "perldelta" manpage and diff -ru's of the sources very carefully as each new release comes out
- Rewriting the camel once, and the llama twice
- Contributing to the shiny ball book, and that OOP book from down under
- Writing the alpaca book
- Reviewing a dozen other Perl books
- Working for a dozen clients over the years as a Perl hacker
- Writing over 170 magazine articles
- Answering 3000+ posts here
- Answering an uncountable number of Usenet postings
- Answering dozens of perl-beginner mailing list posts
- Answering thousands of private emails
- Attending 7 TPCs and 2 YAPCs and nearly 20 GeekCruises
- Visiting roughtly a hundred different Perl Monger events
- Hanging out with the boards of TPI and PM after founding them
- Paying attention to search.cpan.org's "recent module" list
- Reading the more interesting module details from that list
And I still have a lot to learn.
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|