I would say get stuck in... You are speaking of larger projects well choose one and start working on it. Small steps and one at a time. Then when you have the first small stp running go back and improve what you have made with what you have learned. Ask many questions as this will help you figure out how to do the more complex stuff and how to get the basics just right.
Make sure you start every script with the following two lines (before anything else) use warnings; use strict; And should you make a web page make sure yo also include: use taint; Your first project will take a long time to get started but once done you will see that it isn't that hard it is all about thinking in perl and not in English (or what ever your native toung might be). As an example my first step in perl was writing my name into a database, the next one was a database driven website that had a search engine, a user registration, automatic DNS and mail server configuration, and was able to access and index FTP servers to populate the search engine. Now looking at that code it is, well a decent enough first attempt but I would most likely not ever make so many mistakes in a row as I did with that site, (it did work in the end, all of it) I actually have long since improved it several times over as I have learned more about how to do the things right or much faster than I was doing them before. Yet that is where I learned my basic perl skills. All in all I would say start working with it and don't worry about making mistakes or things taking a long time. You will in a few years look back at your first steps and think you should have done well everything difffrent. Programing in that way is not much diffrent from dating ;-) Regards, Rob On 11/28/05, Tom Yarrish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hey all, > I've been reading this list for a while, and I've been trying to > learn perl on my own for quite some time. However, my job doesn't > really (from my vantage point at least) "allow" me to do any sort of > programming (by that I mean my day to day work is more administrative > and project related versus writing any code). So it makes it > difficult for me to apply what I've read from the O'Reilly books to > real world problems (and I've read the Llama book a few times). > My main issue has been trying to come up with a way to build up any > type of perl skills, and I know to do that requires writing code. > However it's been difficult for me to come up with something to > write. Some of the things I think about doing are too far ahead of > my skill set, and I want to have a better understanding of > fundamentals before I take on larger "programming projects." I tend > to be more of a "hands on" type of person, so as I do things more and > more, I understand how it works. > So I was curious as to what some of the more experienced perl mongers > out there have done to improve their Perl skills past reading the > standard books. Do you go to some sites and improve code? Do you > just sit around and think up something to program? > How do you improve your skills, if you're not programming "every day"? > > Thanks, > Tom > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin) > > iD8DBQFDioieZWzkfeDiTw4RAg4WAKCLhU6608TfxBbEizcPlxM6wSQF4QCgl4WA > iSy33Z2jwGwglMxbXIW/z8I= > =yaZm > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > -- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response> > > >
