lunaprey has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
Hi everyone,
What I'm about to say might come off as offending to some, but please know I don't mean to question the way things are, I only wish to try my own way on my path to enlightenment in both perl as well as life. :)
So I believe the best way to learn something is to do it. That's because the best way to learn is to take a keen interest in what it is you're learning, so that your complete attention goes into learning it.
With learning as you create something you value, you get immediate gratification with every tool you learn to write, and understand. This incentivises the learning process, and this is how I taught myself PHP, SQL, CSS, HTML, and some JS.
I am a web developer. I sell websites to both online clients as well as offline clients. I find a lot of the online clients to be high level guild leaders of popular online games who wish for tools related to the game itself.
I find that a lot of these websites get their most valuable tools from data collected from the game itself either through an API, scraping, or data submitted by players themselves.
What I'd like to do, is learn Perl so that I can gain access to the game clients, and use pack sniffing or the memory to mine valuable data that can then be parsed into cool tools and information for the users.
So I ask you guys this. What is the most effective way I can go about creating a tool to collect data from a game client, and then submitting the data to a database or FTP?
Please just give me leads. Something to google. Perhaps a tool that's already written that I can observe, and learn from. Any resources at all to help me figure this out. I taught myself web development because I wanted to emulate a text based game once, so I have no doubt I can do it again with Perl for the sake of creating better tools for clients.
Thanks,
Luna