A beginner's perspective

[BorgCopyeditor]

I've been writing perl for about 2 months. It's the first programming language I've had anything to do with since I learned BASIC on my TRS-80 as a kid. (Unless we count Javascript, but there I was mostly cutting and pasting to put some doo-dads on my web pages, something that has lost its charm.)

Since I knew HTML pretty well and had some specific needs (e.g., character encoding), I "rolled my own" instead of learning CGI.pm. The fact is, I didn't know I was supposed to do any different. The few example scripts I happened to come across all printed HTML directly instead of generating it via a module.

Coming (finally) to the point. Because I was unaware of the module, I came to learn a bunch of neat things on my own. Trying to get perl to parse other people's pages was hellish, as was trying to print output in a variety of encodings (based on user configuration), but it taught me a bit about regular expressions that I might not have learned otherwise. And learning how to parse forms led me to investigate pack.

In short, I approached things as opportunities for exploration as much as tasks that needed to be done. (Since this is a hobby, I'm lucky to have that leisure.) Eventually, discussions here and on usenet (where I went when I couldn't figure things out for myself) led me to rethink how I had been coding certain things. But I'm not sure it would have been better to be exposed to this sage advice first, or be handed a module, because I might have missed a good opportunity to exercise my wits on a problem.

BCE
--Your punctuation skills are insufficient!