Re: A reasonable approach to getting a Perl skill foundation?

[graff]

in reply to A reasonable approach to getting a Perl skill foundation?

If there's time, I think it would be worthwhile to pick one or two of the more quick-witted co-workers, have them sit at their keyboard with a browser tuned to the perldoc.perl.org man pages and search.cpan.org, and stand or sit next to them as they bring up (a copy of) one of your scripts in a suitable editor, and also start it up at a command line using "perl -d ..."

Once they see how the debugger works and how to look up the docs for functions and modules, it'll just be a matter of remembering those very basic modes of access.

Make sure to show them the help page in the debugger; how to set and clear break points and watch expressions; how to inspect contents of variables and results of expressions; how to add use Data::Dumper if it not there already just so you can do p Dumper($ref); when to use "s" vs. "n"; and maybe even how to set up a statement to be executed before or after each prompt.

When it's a matter of getting a quick and sure handle on practical skills for perl programming, nothing beats stepping through some code with the man pages readily at hand.