On Mon, 2002-04-29 at 15:45, Anthony Beaman wrote: > Bingo! I agree and I think that's my problem with all > of this. I think that the documentation pages can be over > a newbie's (myself) head. For example, the Win32 extensions > are great and I'm really getting into them but I have > problems sometimes getting them to run in my codes. Good > advice, also, about the books. Personally, I'm on NT and > am moving to Unix or Linux later (after I learn C and > Assembly), so I'm using the Learning Perl on Win32. Then > I'm going to use the Camel book. Any advice on getting the > most out of the 2 Learning Perl books? (or shall I repost > this question, i.e., a new thread?) Thanks! >
The most important thing is to start using the language. Perl is a very forgiving language in this regard. You can't do very many useful things with C in the first few weeks, but in Perl you can be doing things like parsing text files in under a week. Choosing a pet project can be hard so here are a few (not so useful) projects: 1. Re-implement your favorite command line tool (TYPE, MORE, DIR, etc. for DOS based people or cat, less, ls, etc. for Unix based people). 2. Write an application to summarize a text file (size, average word length, average line length, average words per line, common words, etc.). 3. Pick one of the various homework assignments people invariably post to this list (you can recognize them by the question "I want to do X. How do I do it in Perl?" without any evidence to how that the questioner has tried some method of solving the problem 4. In fact, just choose any problem described on this list that you think you know how to do or think you may be able to learn to do. After trying to solve it on your own look at the advice (if any) we gave to the questioner and see how that might improve your solution. -- Today is Prickle-Prickle the 46th day of Discord in the YOLD 3168 Or is it? Missile Address: 33:48:3.521N 84:23:34.786W -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
