Re: What are the business needs from Perl

[jdrago_999]

Please let me know what I should learn in Perl, besides the fundamentals in Learning Perl and Perl Cookbook.

To make some bullet-points about "what to learn" I would start with this list:

• Also read (cover to cover) Programming Perl - it is the definitive guide to the language itself.
• REGULAR EXPRESSIONS!!!
• Learn how to install CPAN modules
• Learn how to write CPAN modules
• Unit Testing
  • Test::More is a great place to start.
  • Devel::Cover should be looked into from there.
  • Devel::NYTProf might come up next.
• object-oriented design
  • encapsulation
  • polymorphism
  • inheritance
  • abstraction
• Linux - the basics
  • ls
  • ps
  • top
  • grep
  • find
• Database programming and design
  • SQL
  • 3rd normalized form
• Network Programming Basics
  • difference between TCP and UDP
  • difference between a socket and a filehandle
• multi-threaded programming
  • difference between processes and threads
  • know when to use threads vs forks
  • understand how to distribute workload in a way that gets the job done as quickly as possible
• event-based programming
  • callbacks
  • events
  • publish/subscribe pattern (aka the "observer" pattern)

It would also be worth familiarizing yourself with what are known as "Design Patterns" since knowing them will help you articulate (in code) what you are trying to accomplish.

[Joost]

Agreed with most of this list. Two remarks:

I don't think perl's threading is all that interesting (except when interfacing with threaded C/C++ code).

Multi-process (forking/IPC) code is more useful just because it's more general (and also easier to translate into multi-machine/networked code), and because of that I'd recommend POE as a good framework to lean since it really makes IPC, networking and event programming a lot easier.