Re: What book would be valuable to someone self-taught?

[perl.j]

Learn a New Language

That's the best advice I can give you. Perl is a great, powerful language, don't get me wrong there. But you don't have to be stuck with Perl forever. There are not many ways to take a step up from Perl, as it truly is extremely powerful. But taking a step down will only help you.

You can learn C or C++ as they are great languages, but are pretty limited compared to Perl. Because Perl has most of the functions that C uses, this will help you when you use Perl, as I can almost guarantee you have not used everything Perl has to offer.

You could also shift to another language that is comparable to Perl, such as Python. I have never used Python before, but I've heard it is extremely powerful and pretty cool (not as cool as Perl of course).

As for the books...

• Pragmatic Programmer
• Programming Pearls

[aaron_baugher]

Another option would be to learn a different language that tends to force you to think in different ways. I've mostly used Perl in procedural ways, because that was my background from assembly and BASIC and C, so lately I've been dabbling with Lisp/Scheme, to get more comfortable with functional programming and concepts like closures and first-class functions. You can do functional programming in Perl, and some recent books like Higher Order Perl get into that; but a language like Lisp practically demands it, and tutorials include it as par for the course. Getting out of my comfort zone helps me to stop thinking, "Yeah, but why not just do it the way I've always done it?" and immerse myself in this different way of solving problems. Then I can come back to Perl and apply what I've learned.