Re: Re: Re: The Gates of Perl are not newbie friendly.

[demerphq]

A couple of comments: Unlike some others I dont think you went that wrong with the Komodo and the AS support. I personally have them and dont use them much, but I've also seen others with some basic familiarity with other languages use them to come up to speed in perl quite quickly. And frankly for learning/debugging regexes the AS stuff rocks big time. However, you should also install a "normal" AS perl longside that. Eventaully you'll probably switch to using it with a text editor, but for the first while the komodo i think will be comforting.

The normal install comes with a great indexed HTML version of all the standard docs (similar to perldoc.com or the CPAN sites or whatnot). I personally often have three or four browsers open to various pages. For you I would suggest reading perlsyn and a quick glance through perlfunc along side a good read of perlboot perltoot and perltootc. Some may wonder at the later, as they are OO oriented, but personally I found them to be excellent general perl documents that shine just enough light in enough corners that you can get moving quite quickly with just reading them. Even if you dont write a module or class for weeks after reading them, the general exposure will do wonders.

Learning perl is meant to be a fairly smooth and gradual process. The language is designed so that "baby-perl" works but "adult-perl" is possible. So considering you probably have a basic idea of program flow control and the like the best thing to do is to write a project. Every time you say to yourself "theres gotta be a better way to do this" have a poke through the docs, odds are you'll find that you were right. OTOH, if it works dont worry about it, move on the next program. :-) Everybody has the horror story about "their first perl program /brrr" :-)

Oh and youve already done IMO one of the best things you could have done to learn Perl. You've showed up here and asked a reasonable question. You'd be suprised how many people dont get that far ;-)

Good luck.

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demerphq

<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...

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I also strongly encourage you to read anything in the standard docs that has "tut" or "toot" in it. There are a few, and you should at least be familiar with them and the areas they cover so that when you wonder "how do I do X" you know which document to look into. Simply knowing most of their names helps a great deal :-)