User since: Feb 17, 2008 at 04:07 UTC (17 years ago) Last here: May 25, 2010 at 12:19 UTC (14 years ago) Experience: 1134 Level: Friar (9) Writeups: 159 Location: Adelaide, South Australia Favorite food: Green tea (matcha!) Closet: Megalomaniac User's localtime: Sep 14, 2024 at 00:16 UTC Scratchpad: View For this user: Search nodes

^^ in natural habitat

Perl stuff moved below.

Jesus Christ, κυρίου Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ, Yeshua HaMashiach

Me

First and foremost, I'm a Christian. That's my primary identity, before "Perl monk", or "Perl hacker", or anything else. I should quote the word because I don't like the connotations it carries nowadays, and while I consider it a noble label it might communicate something else entirely to you.

The connotations I don't think are accurate (and hence don't imply by the use of 'Christian'):

• Anti-reason. If God created us, He created our minds; gave us the ability to reason, and His reality means human reason has validity.
• Prude. This one's easy - if God created us, He created the pleasure receptors in our brains.

Jesus Christ

What I do intend to communicate by 'Christian' is that I have a relationship with Jesus Christ, the Jewish carpenter who was God Himself. This means several things:

• My sin is dealt with. Human sin is real, both corporate and individual. My sin (individual) has been paid for.
• My eternal destiny is sure. I have no fear of death, since "to live is Christ and to die is gain", "to be with Christ is far better".

Both these things are exceedingly wonderful, and are also entirely undeserved on my part. They are pure grace, blessings of God. They result from who God is: let me tell you about Him.

God's character

• God is kind. He is the kindest person I know!
• God is love
• God delights in blessing people. His heart is always to bless, but He won't bless things that take you away from Him.
• God is moral. "You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell."
• "As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?"

The Sharp End

God is moral. He has standards for human behavior. Human sin is primarily the rejection of God Himself, but also the consequent rejection of His standards. This is not a trifling matter - sin deeply offends God. And He will not allow it to exist unchallenged (or unpunished). You yourself have sinned, and deeply offended Him. You deserve His judgement... in other words, you deserve to die, eternally. God must punish your sin - it offends Him that deeply. He is disgusted by it.

But He is love! With those two words He defines Himself. He loves you more than you can possibly imagine! To satisfy His moral nature, and yet have mercy on YOU, He chose to bear His own punishment. He became a man and lived as a human should. He didn't sin, at all.

And then he took the punishment you so richly deserve. He bore the punishment for all your sin - all of it! And if you would believe in Him, in Jesus Christ, and in what He has done for you - there is no condemnation for you, nor punishment. God the Father can call you His child. And that is an amazing thing. :)

Perl Mnemonics

** please PM me if you have mnemonics not listed here **

Why?

Because Perl is such a rich language, there's a lot to keep straight in your head. Mnemonics are a lot quicker than consulting the docs, especially if you can't remember (hehe) which docs you need to consult.

The Mnemonics

I/O
$/ - droplet falls to left, or I - input record seperator
$\ - droplet falls to right, or O - output record separator
[download]

$\ goes where you put a \n in your print()
$, goes where you put a , in your print()
[download]

sort { length $b <=> length $a } @vals
('b' has a higher ASCII value than 'a' and comes first, so it's descen
+ding)
[download]

Favorite nodes

(Sorted chronologically per section - i.e. by node ID, ascending

General

• when building for a user (first node!)
• The path to mastery
• 7 Stages of Regex Users
• Are state machines just for parsing?
• How do you master Perl?
• Why Change (The benefits of Perl 6)
• An index to The Perl Journal articles on Dr. Dobbs
• Code Maintainability

Debugging

• Basic debugging checklist

Perl 6

• Mini HowTo: How to port Perl 5 modules to Perl 6

Web

At some point you'll want to use Perl in a web-client-ish capacity. I'll save you the trouble: just use WWW::Mechanize. It gives you all the functionality of LWP::UserAgent, and then some (yes, it's a subclass). If you need to handle Javas‎crip‎t, WWW::Selenium might help.

• Using WWW::Selenium To Test Or Automate An Ajax Website

Database

• DBI recipes

Inline

• Inline::C and Packaged Distributions

Tutorials

• Closure on Closures

Home nodes

for varying reasons of low entropy, profundity, humor, et al:

• Erudil has some good quotes, in particular the Perlmonks quote by robin
• turnstep's home node is a good guide to the Monastery
• Withigo
• BrowserUk
• herveus (Halloo, gnomey!)
• Your Mother (Both quotes are excellent)
• tmoertel (Salut to a fellow coffee afficionado... Coder's Guide to Coffee is mandatory reading for anyone who drinks instant 'coffee')
• davido ( :) at 'Recommended Reading in Order of Taming' )

Lesser-known corners of the Monastery

How about... a satiated monk PM mockup? Or Perlmonks Usernames 101? Or some braindumps of the early devs? Or the home node of that long-time member of Societas Eruditorum? (I think it meant to say 'great red hair'.) Or proof the gods are telepathic? Or The Go Poem?

Who posted first at Perlmonks?

I'll define 'first post' as first non-testing, non-gods, non-root, non-PM-page, non-site-functionality node. Then, contrary to popular opinion, it wasn't paco... it was nate! Right here.