Re: Free Perl IDE for a begginer

[starX]

I almost can't believe no one's suggested this to you, but have you looked at Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics? From the description: "This book shows biologists with little or no programming experience how to use Perl..."

Seems to me like a good place to start for you, but I must add the disclaimer that I am not a biologist, and I've never picked up this book myself. It might be worth checking out though.

Also, I stand by the folks that talk about emacs (especially with cperl mode installed) and the command line perl interpreter as being the way to go. use strict; and use warnings;, get the feel of the perl debugger, and make ample use of the chatterbox and SOPW, and I'm sure you'll be fine.

[Anonymous Monk]

I am just looking for some description of functionalities of the recommended programs and it seems that all the recommendations are big improvements over my current technique (syntax highliting editor + bat files (*.pl and pause) to run the script in cmd.
Thanks for help.

In fact I am aware of the book (Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics) and I can even recommend it. It is almost 5 years since I had to do some DNA/protein sequence manipulation and when looking whether there was a way how to automate I stumbled against the book (online,link dead now). It demonstrated perl syntax/structures/techniques on the problems of my interest as examples, so I just had to get oriented a little (the book is really clearly written), slightly modify and put together relevant chunks of the code (a matter of one week time). But since I forget everything and only notion remained that perl is good for string manipulation (which is of interest for me again now). The book had one drawback thought - there was to much molecular biology explained for a molecular biologist`s taste, so I will go for Learning Perl and Getting Started with Perl recommended by trialmonkey.
thanks
karpatov