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Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

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Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#51

Post by pbi »

michaelpinto wrote: post #27

I've been working with Perl programmers for just about ten years now and the one thing I've sadly learned is that while many folks claim to know Perl, but only a small group can do it well. (although granted you can apply this reality to any other programming language)

Perl is easy to start with by learning something like "Hello World!". Probably just because of this reason, most people stop at early learning stage. Perl was originally created to bridge the gap between C and shell. At the end, it is a language hard to grasp, yet very powerful.

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#54

Post by pbi »

d2 wrote: post #29

Sam, you've certainly made an enemy out of every member of the Perl community with this sarcastic and incomplete post. Once you've gotten through OReilly's beginner Perl books and "Programming Perl", if you truly want to learn how to scale Perl in the enterprise, read Damian Conway's Object Oriented Perl. Once you can write solid consistent OO Perl, read "Apache modules with Perl and C".

The intro is okay, but it did not help Perl community at all. Besides, the article itself has some poor code. For example, if one wants returning nothing, return "" is a very bad idea, since to catch it in as array would make an one-element array which is true.

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#55

Post by krishna2 »

bluekeybox wrote: post #38

If you really want to learn Perl, you must install the read-eval-print loop (REPL) utility. If you have never used this utility, I will have serious grounds to doubt your Perl skills. Unlike Ruby or Python (or most other modern high-level programming languages), Perl does not come with an interactive REPL shell, which makes no sense at all, since, due to Perl's obscure syntax, someone trying out Perl would benefit at…

You can also go into the debug shell (which is REPL) by giving it some valid statement: Here is an example:

shell> perl -de 1

This will take you into the perl debug shell (after evaluating the string "1" which is true).

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#56

Post by pitchups »

benologist wrote: post #21
chromatic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you're thinking of PLEAC? http://pleac.sourceforge.net/ Or perhaps Rosetta Code? http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page

Rosetta Code's the one I was thinking of, but I really dislike their structure - I never want to see how to do something in dozens of languages, almost all of which aren't relevant to me. What I would love to see is: 1) select language you want to learn 2) select languages you already know 3) you get a cheatsheet like the OP that goes through all the basics (and maybe even more detailed), and all the code samples are…

Perhaps someone can use Rosetta code as a starting point (their content is GNU licensed) and build a site that does what you are suggesting - where it only shows you the features for the languages you want to learn, based on the ones you know.

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#58

Post by Goladus »

tedkalaw wrote: post #28
wallfly wrote: post #16

Over the past week I've read "Modern Perl", and will finish it later today: http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/ The ebook/PDF edition is free! It's a great book for learning (modern) Perl basics if you're already familiar with programming concepts and another language like JavaScript (which is where I'm coming from). Actually, I think the knowledge and best-practices gleaned from the book will help to make me a be…

Were you previously a Perl programmer at all? And are you learning it for any particular purpose? I've always wanted to give Perl a go but can't find something I want to use it for.

Personally, I've found knowing perl useful in some of the same ways that I've found C useful. Perl is still one of the most popular systems scripting languages and perl code always seems to show up somewhere important.

If I were into serious application development I would probably try a project with Clojure before perl, but there are a lot of situations where that might not be desireable (eg you don't want to use the JVM).

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#59

Post by jonathansizz »

tedkalaw wrote: post #28
wallfly wrote: post #16

Over the past week I've read "Modern Perl", and will finish it later today: http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/ The ebook/PDF edition is free! It's a great book for learning (modern) Perl basics if you're already familiar with programming concepts and another language like JavaScript (which is where I'm coming from). Actually, I think the knowledge and best-practices gleaned from the book will help to make me a be…

Were you previously a Perl programmer at all? And are you learning it for any particular purpose? I've always wanted to give Perl a go but can't find something I want to use it for.

Text processing (data munging, web programming, networking, system adminstration), of course!

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#60

Post by chromatic »

derrickpetzold wrote: post #52

Oh my why would anyone want to lean Perl anymore? Unless you are working with a legacy codebase learn Python, Ruby, Java, C#, Erlang, Scala, Haskell... in other words run the f away from Perl if you can unless you are into S&M.

Oh my why would anyone want to lean Perl anymore?

Because it's powerful, it's easy to start, it's flexible, it's productive, it's ubiquitous, and it has an unparalleled extension ecosystem devoted to quality and ease of use.

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