On Monday, April 29, 2002, at 06:00 , Richard Adams wrote:
[..]
> The main problem I've had learning Perl is trying to separate out the
> "need
> -to -know" stuff from the "very clever but you can get by without it"
> info,
> esp in the manpages and the Camel book. Also I find the exercises in the
> deitel book for C very useful for getting the syntax firmly learned.
[..]
My complements to the rest who have proposed very useful bits.
What I would advocate are two areas of importance - the first
is the simplest:
perldoc perl
and understand the sections already documented with the perl
code that you are privy to at this point - since this material
is online and faster to get at than the 'books'. This will also
prep you to read about new modules as you run into them, and
before the luddites have the chance to muder treePersons to
see you what you could have read on line... 8-)
The second most important notion is
use Benchmark;
http://www.wetware.com/drieux/CS/lang/Perl/Beginners/BenchMarks/
If you really want a clue about the trade offs of this or that,
go and Benchmark it - resolve the technical distinctions yourself -
the failure of both C and perl is that they do not prevent you
from doing that which you wish....
It is a rather fun way to resolve why you want X over Y as a solution.
After this you can get into the developer suite of tools and
since you are coming from the K&R 'C' side you will of course
want to better understand h2xs - so that you can get into the
whole process of creating your own 'just a stack of functionality'
perl modules - so that you can 'reuse code' - without having to
get lost in the maze of OO stuff.....
http://www.wetware.com/drieux/CS/lang/Perl/PM/
Along the way, use the beginner's mailing list as the
"play along at home game."
If you see a neat piece tossed up as a 'solution' or a 'problem'
prove it to yourself....
and last but not least,
did we mention '-w' and 'use strict;'
YES, just do it.
ciao
drieux
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