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Re: Enlightenment and Frustration

by lin0 (Curate)
on Apr 26, 2007 at 17:46 UTC ( [id://612237]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Enlightenment and Frustration

Hi chexmix,

I understand your frustration. I sometimes feel the same when I do not fully understand the topic at hand. I will give you my 2 cents advice hoping that it will help you.

First, you need to find something practical that you want to accomplish. In other words, you need to find purpose. It could be that you want to develop a game (such as Racing Mice with Language::Logo - MouseRace.pm) or you want to track stocks (as in Get US stock tables from WSJ) , or you want to write a cool obfuscation (like the one in Genetic Code). Whatever it is you want to do with Perl, it is a good idea to have a purpose in mind. Having a purpose will simplify things because you can focus on what you need to learn to accomplish your goal. This will keep you motivated and will help you find immediate use for what you are learning.

Once you achieve your initial goal, you might want to expand your horizon adding new goals and learning new things that will help you accomplish those goals.

Finally, I encourage you to have a look at the following nodes for some useful ideas:

Cheers!

lin0

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Re^2: Enlightenment and Frustration
by chexmix (Hermit) on May 01, 2007 at 20:47 UTC
    This is advice I take very much to heart - as an inveterate reader and knowledge-sponge it is waaaaaayyy too easy for me to opt to "read another book" rather than actually DOING something. It is a big struggle for me (maybe the biggest ... marriage was a big one, too, but I've failed that'n twice), but with Perl I am trying to focus on "doing things" with some basic astronomical data, since astronomy is my #1 life-force-passion-devotion-thingie.

    That sounds vague. Right now I am trying to really nail down the basics of the language by massaging, spindling and mutilating -- seeing what I can do to -- a copy of some observational data collected by the Saguaro Astronomy Club of Tucson, AZ. This is a collection that has been around for a long time and is used in some software created for amateur astronomers ... so it is looking forward to my "big goal" of trying to code an observation planning-and-logging application.

        Many thanks. I've looked at PDL a little in the past but have sort of tended to shunt into the pile of "things to look at when I know more." I didn't know that its creator (Glazebrook) was the one who IDd the "cosmic latte" overall color of the universe! :^) PDL gets me to wondering in what directions I will eventually need to re-up and strengthen my math skills in order to become a better Perl person. That's a whole other kettle of stuff ... - GB

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