Unsuprisingly I will suggest picking up a scripting language

Post #47,540 by ben_tilly 7/30/02 10:10:02 PM Reply	Unsuprisingly I will suggest picking up a scripting language If it were employable, I would say Ruby. Personal impression. For me Ruby takes about half the code of Perl. It doesn't run as fast though, and I have to write all of the bits that in Perl I would get from CPAN. YMMV. Since Perl is more employable, I will suggest it instead. Unless you want to do Python, which might be a better language to learn. (That seems to be a personality thing.) For Perl I will recommend [link\|http://www.perlmonks.org\|Perl Monks] as a good resource, and O'Reilly books as generally reliable references. (Learning Perl does what its title promises. Makes it easy for anyone who can think with a "programming mindset" to learn Perl.) Now why a scripting language? It is easy. Scripting languages are generally pretty easy to pick up, and you can get a lot more done in a hurry with them. They all have good web page support. That allows you to fairly easily learn the major protocols and understand how that works. Which is good material if you are likely to come anywhere near the web. They all have good database support that is simple to use. Building an interactive web page is a good reason to set up a database, and a good way to use SQL enough to do something useful. There is a pretty large fairly common core of ideas that scripting languages use (eg hashes and regexps). So once you have learned one, you can learn others. JavaScript is a scripting language. Unfortunately it is not an easy one to debug, and it is in a complex environment, so learning to program it directly is not so easy. But learn a scripting language first and it carries over really well. Much more closely than, say, a system language. Scripting languages support a lot of different programming paradigms. Java really pushes you to try to be OO. With a scripting language you can put off learning OO until you want to, and then learn what the OO thing is in its own good time. (If OO is a primary goal for you, then Python or Ruby may be a better choice than Perl. Perl's OO works and is flexible, but it isn't very well integrated into the language. OTOH if you do go with Perl, then I will strongly recommend Damian Conway's Object Oriented Perl to help you get the point and see the possibilities of OO.) So what it all boils down to is that you can learn enough of a scripting language to be useful pretty easily, and then turn that knowledge around to start picking up a fair variety of job skills that you really want to say you have. Cheers, Ben "... I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything." --Richard Feynman
Post #47,760 by rsteiner 8/1/02 4:35:32 PM Reply	Thanks, Ben... Strangely enough, I already have copies of _Learning Perl_ and _Programming Perl_ on my bookshelf, and it's very high on my list of things to learn. Probably second after Java, or maybe even first if I can find an interesting reason to use it more around here. I'm a big fan of scripting languages myself -- during my time at NWA I wrote a lot of utilities using a Unisys-platform-specific scripting language called CALL, and I found that the use of an interpreted language was be quite helpful when I was debugging things. Very fast turnaround time from "oops" to "fix". :-) -Rich Steiner (OS/2 and Linux user in Eden Prairie, MN) The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Post #47,777 by broomberg 8/1/02 5:58:57 PM Reply	Re: Thanks, Ben... Don't bother with the Llama book. Get the big Coriolis Black book (there is also a small hand book)
Post #47,788 by ben_tilly 8/1/02 8:51:07 PM Reply	Why not? And isn't the big Coriolis Black Book the one that Ben Kosse loved which didn't bother doing error checks on open? Which is the kind of shortcoming that means that I would never even consider recommending it? Am I mixing it up with something else? As for the Llama, it is simple I admit. But it doesn't do anything stupid without reason. Programming Perl I am more ambivalent about. If you are the kind of person who can do that, starting in with "perldoc perl" and working from there gives basically the same material, only guaranteed to match whatever what is on your machine, and including various useful modules as well. OTOH it is an important book to have, even if I haven't touched either of my copies in a couple of years (except to settle arguments about what it says). And if online documentation isn't you... But the Perl Cookbook I would add as a must-have for learning common idioms and techniques. Random example: C programmers do not generally think of having a hash whose values are irrelevant. (Why would you do that you ask? Well does the name %is_found suggest anything?:-) Cheers, Ben "Perl is like vice grips. You can do anything with it, and it's the wrong tool for every job." --Unknown
Post #48,026 by broomberg 8/4/02 10:08:32 AM Reply	Dunno I't been so song since I've made that decision I don't remember why. Sorry. It has gone from a reasoned decision to cargo cult programming. I just flipped pages until I saw an open example and it included an 'or dir' construct. I won't claim all of them do. You MUST have Programming Perl (CAMEL). There is no choice. Nobody wanders perldoc and hits on things serendipitiously. But you can do that in flipping around in the book in the bathroom. Just commit to carrying the book for a month, and you become amazed what the language can do. Also, yes on the Cookbook. I still pull it out occasionally. I love it.
Post #48,104 by ben_tilly 8/5/02 6:56:34 AM Reply	Perhaps... I will admit that my introduction to Perl was picking up Programming Perl, getting less than a half-dozen pages through it, and my wife asked me what I wsa laughing about. After that I was clearly doomed. (Appreciating the humor is essential. For instance they have a simple test-grader and a comment about how it won't work properly if "Carol" appears twice. Carol was one of the few names that didn't appear twice in the sample input.) But after a couple of years I went from Programming Perl to perldoc. You can grep online documents, and there is more there. And when I picked up a "free" copy of the third edition, I never read it. However I still know the second edition well-enough to pick up a copy and quickly find the right page to settle arguments. (OTOH I am more likely to give people the appropriate perldoc command an instructions on what string to search for.) Cheers, Ben "Perl is like vice grips. You can do anything with it, and it's the wrong tool for every job." --Unknown

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