I've got a rep

[trochee]

I just had an EE professor ask me for advice on how he can go learn Perl.

Sometimes I think I must actually know what I'm doing.

Comments

[motive-nuance.livejournal.com]

What was the advice?

[trochee.livejournal.com]

he was asking me for what were good books to learn it from. "I hear you're a Perl hacker," he wrote. "I need a book to learn perl with, and have around as a reference. I've got an extensive programming background."

except the email had the header "Perle book?" which was a warning flag for me. It's not Richard Perle, for cryin' out loud.

Here was my advice:

I would recommend the Learning Perl book -- minimum third edition. (Second ed. is okay, but third is much better; if the 4th is coming out soon then you could wait but I wouldn't!).

If you've got an extensive programming background you'll whip right through it, but get a pretty good survey in the process. For getting stuff done on a day-to-day basis, I use the Perl Cookbook occasionally, and the Programming Perl book is a great reference but is kinda too much to deal with as a learning book.

Nice!

[lx.livejournal.com]

I hope your first piece of advice was To Go A Little Crazy. It helps.

I realized the other day that reading Programming Perl is something I occasionally do not to learn, but just for fun.

This may be a cry for help.

Re: Nice!

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Sounds like "larval stage". I do that too. Sometimes I read the Lunde book (CJKV Information Processing) or the Perl Cookbook for the same reasons.

wee! geek pride.

Re: Nice!

[lx.livejournal.com]

I think part of it is just the entertainingly loony writing style of the PP book. Perl is also just one of those languages that consistently makes me smile like an idiot at how simple (albeit sometimes also entertainingly messy) solutions can be to seemingly difficult problems.

Yeah, geek pride forever! Haha.

Re: Nice!

[xaosenkosmos.livejournal.com]

The Cookbook is full of some of the craziest code i've ever seen. I love it.

Another Josh-parable!

[xaosenkosmos.livejournal.com]

Once there was a remote village, far from contact with any outside contact. The tribe of this village had a wiseman, a sage who explained that all the world was the result of a creation by supernatural forces, that the wind was stirred up by spirits wandering the earth, and that it was very important for the young women of the village to dance nude every month, to appease the wind-makers.

One day, recognizing his learning, a man of the village asked the shaman, "Why is the sky blue?"