Re: Mastering Perl (the book) mailing list

[systems]

I am not sure I agree on the categorization the author made!

In the book proposal, the author suggest it fills the gap between programming perl, and advanced perl programming.
After thinking about this statement for a while, I don't think I agree that there is such a gap.
Advanced Perl, seem to cover domain specific topics, while programming perl teaches perl, with as much detail as possible
Point is, I think we need to do a better segmentation for the programming book markets, from the quality of many books, I have my doubts anyone have done so seriously
When I started to learn programming, I had 3 types of questions?

• Beginners questions: What is Object Oriented? Which IDE should I use? Vi Or Emacs? Which language should I pick: python or perl? whats a socket? What a port? How do I hack an IP? what is ODBC
• Post beginners questions: How does a program really work? What do I need to know to be very very good? Whats a services? Whats a daemon? Should I learn assembly? Whats really a network? How do I compile? How does the compilation process work? what is linking? whats ADO and OLE?
• Post post beginner questions: How do I do xxxx? How can I manage my code?

To be more specific my categorization is,

• level 1, I dont know nothing, i want broad guide lines.
• level 2, I want to know the theory and indepth knowledge of how things work
• level 3,now that I know many things I want to be productive

In my experience, most books that try to attack level 1 and 2 fails badly, and instead of doing so, what i see is

• Beginner book, attack level 3, but simple stuff, how to create an object, manipulate a string, do simple math, looping and branching (basic alogirthms)
• Intermediate book, attack level 3, but more complex stuff, database programming, gui programming, web programming.
• Advanced book, at level 3, but they attack more topic that concern code administration and maintenace of code

Well, finally, i would like to say, i wonna see more books on level 1 and 2, those will really help create programmers with the fundamental knowledge, programmers who know why we do what we do, and not just how?

on a side note, i couldn't find the table of content, of the intermediate perl programming book, and i have to admit, intermediate have to be where most programmers see themselves, very smart and attractive title