Re: Perl and School

[moritz]

Let's start with the bottom of your post: Your current skills are certainly enough to start a project. You'll need to learn more as you go along, and that's the best way of learning for many people.

As for small things, I found generating some graphics to be quite rewarding. A bit basic geometry and SVG lets you quickly create graphics which give you visual feedback -- something I always liked. Once you learn about the trig functions (like sin, cos, tan) you can do almost everything in graphics you set your mind to, and playing with them in graphics gives you a much better feeling for them.

For the bigger projects I don't think I can give good recommendations, because it will have to be something that you want, otherwise your motivation will die out rather quickly.

But what I want to point is that with the Internet, very cool projects are possible with rather little programming knowledge. Open Street Map allows you to build earth maps according to your liking, Amazon provides meta data for very many books, Wikipedia has lists of famous persons, historical events by date etc. There's a huge load of data out there that you can turn into something awesome -- only your imagination is your limit.

And don't worry that everybody should use it -- if you want to use your own program, that's a very good start, maybe others will follow.

[perl.j]

Thank You. Your post is basically what I was looking for. +1 for you.