How I learnt Perl despite the bad press
By bad press I mean, "Perl is an unreadable language ... you should not use it"
I use perl for sys admin stuff and prototyping some pretty lame ideas.
some observations
For the beginners, perl on the tubes has two presses
- perl is difficult to learn because of all the "rules", "different contexts", edge cases along with the above bad press
- perl is easy to pick up because with a minimum amount of concepts you can write successful programs
And some pretty long fucking answers
People of the perl land, when some one asks - should I learn perl ? | is perl difficult to learn?, just say
"yes and perl programmers will gladly help you learn it"
how i learnt it
perldoc, the perl test suite and the perl cookbook
The perl test suite helped me quite a bit. Any irritating syntax doubts directly got clarified. And not just the perl syntax, but each module comes with a test suite which is awesome since I can see the api in action.
That's how I got to learn baby perl.
I bought the camel book. After that I grew more confidence in my scripts and began thinking out aloud in perl.
I blog about Perl.
I suppose you're talking about my answer in that Stackoverflow thread. It's not at all long, and it's actually quite short considering the number of topics I address.
But, I never answered the question "Should I learn Perl?".
yikes .. I did not mean to publish this ... lots of mistakes and I wanted to add some examples
*sigh*
brian, there is nothing wrong with your answer.
For Python or Ruby, the answers are usually just "yes! yes! yes! hop on young chap and welcome to paradise", irrespective of the background of the person in question.
But for perl, I remember reading some quite defensive answers.
Depending on the person asking the question, the answer could vary from,
1) "no you should learn php first"
2) "yes" and some links
Although the detail in your answer is reasonable, one can easily take your eye for detail as being defensive.
I was just trying to come up with a tl;dr version.
Perl is icky to learn no doubt, but after some time with it, I find it extremely reliable (which needs to stressed more than the ickyness)
Edit:
interesting read !
http://petdance.com/2011/10/theres-only-one-useful-way-to-handle-your-detractors/
or in other words,
1)ignore the trolls
2)if in doubt leave a positive reply rather than an defensive one
Another good resource to learn what to do in Perl (and what not to do) is Perl-Begin - The Perl Beginners' Site along with the various resources linked from there. Unfortunately, it hasn't gained a lot of maintstream acceptance, but I'm still maintaining it.
Hi Shlomi,
Love your work !
I also hoped you would write a continuation to http://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/Perl/Haskell/slides/
I am still hoping :)