X-no-Archive:yes
First, I want to sing the praises of learning something new, and being in
learning mode. I am convinced that it is a great and necessary experience,
if only to keep one's mind fresh and limber, and one's attitude humble(r).

I, too, am stumbling my way around perl, off and on (not an approach I would
recommend). A peer has loaned me three books. One is the "camel book", which
Ted Ashton and Arthur Frank have recommended. It violates my "first chapter"
rule. I try to read the first chapter of a technical book before I buy it.
If the author can lose me in his first chapter, I am probably not going to
fare well reading the entire book. I have yet to be disappointed by a book
whose first chapter I enjoyed. In the case of the Camel book, I was doing
reasonably well, and then got hopelessly confused, all in that first
chapter. But, as Ted wrote, "the camel is what you'll find yourself coming
back to over and over." I go to it to quickly refresh my understanding of
something I've already used, and managed to forget or struggle with again
later. And, I agree with Arthur, that if I wind up doing a lot with perl,
I'll buy that ORA perl CD.

The book I prefer for reading and learning (which makes this advice probably
worthless for anyone else, unless they happen to be a lot like me) is "Teach
Yourself Perl in 21 Days". Right on the front cover, under the title, it
says "Assumes no prior programming knowledge" (so I never leave it lying
around!). Much of the material is wasted on me, since I already understand
what a while loop IS (although I am thinking of working thru this book with
my twelve-year old son as an exercise in programming logic and language
learning, as well as mentoring him in my own approach to learning something
new as part of adult life). So I'm able to skip and skim large sections. But
I've yet to struggle to understand the book, or even to implement what I'm
learning.

I've enjoyed scripting on other platform, so I enjoy what I'm doing with
perl, which is batch scripting. However, not being especially familiar with
either UNIX or C, the constructs are not comfortable, and I regularly forget
single characters, a parenthesis here, a $ or ; there. And I struggle too
much with basic concepts that are already familiar from other scripting
languages, but which I just do not know how to implement in perl. So, on my
workstation, I currently have some dozen or so short scripts, the largest
being 1,180 bytes, with names like dountil.1.pl and foreach.2.pl, where I
try to get a very simple implementation of a basic language feature working,
so I can use it in a larger script. I often go back to these, to refresh my
understanding of some construct.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *