5 ms·

What do you suggest for a 'nothing' category? By 'nothing' I mean that I'm a sysadmin, knows a smattering of PERL, a little BASH, a lot of this and that over t

by bdunbar 15y ago

What do you suggest for a 'nothing' category? By 'nothing' I mean that I'm a sysadmin, knows a smattering of PERL, a little BASH, a lot of this and that over the years.

bgilroy26 15y ago
Have you ever taken a look at Higher Order Perl? It's an introduction to Functional Programming in Perl. http://hop.perl.plover.com/ http://hop.perl.plover.com/ This interview with the author covers the point of the book (which is to help Perl programmers to learn non-procedural programming): http://www.theperlreview.com/Interviews/mjd-hop-20050407.html http://www.theperlreview.com/Interviews/mjd-hop-20050407.htm...
gtani 15y ago
If you can wait til Apr 22 (by Amazon's release dates), there will be 2 more clojure books which I'm pretty confident will be excellent, in addition to 2 Manning books which are also great. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_9?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=clojure+programming&sprefix=clojure+p%2Cstripbooks%2C191 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_9?url=search-alias%... And you want to spend quality time in the REPL.
elangoc 15y ago
In my life, I've learned and used the following languages, in this order: Logo, Basic, Pascal, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Clojure. Each time that I learned the next language, I thought it was a great improvement on the previous, and I wondered what I had been spending my life doing with the previous language. My experience is that with Clojure is a testament to pretty much everything in "Beating the Averages" (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) It's hard to know for sure, but I have a feeling that I will end up using Clojure far much longer than the rest of those languages, combined. If you are contemplating learning a language for one-off commands and sysadmin scripts, then I kind of prefer Ruby over Python and Perl for expressiveness and readability. Most Rubyists are of the Rails persuasion, but I still have never learned Rails.
spacemanaki 15y ago
I came to Lisp via "The Little Schemer", and I recommend it for people who are new to Lisp (and/or programming). It's short and sweet, but explores some really interesting and deep ideas (recursion, higher order functions, the Y combinator, the halting problem, and interpreters). I like to think of it as "SICP lite". It won't teach you Clojure, but it will open your eyes and set you on a path to Clojure, and I think give you a very strong grounding for Lisp. At least that's what I think it gave me. On the other hand, if you really want to get up to speed on Clojure specifically, Rich Hickey's talk "Clojure for Java programmers" is a great intro to the language. I don't think you need Java experience to get something out of it, it's mostly targeted at non-Lispers without much functional programming experience. http://blip.tv/clojure/clojure-for-java-programmers-1-of-2-989128 http://blip.tv/clojure/clojure-for-java-programmers-1-of-2-9...

by bdunbar 15y ago

What do you suggest for a 'nothing' category? By 'nothing' I mean that I'm a sysadmin, knows a smattering of PERL, a little BASH, a lot of this and that over the years.

bgilroy26 15y ago

Have you ever taken a look at Higher Order Perl? It's an introduction to Functional Programming in Perl. http://hop.perl.plover.com/ http://hop.perl.plover.com/ This interview with the author covers the point of the book (which is to help Perl programmers to learn non-procedural programming): http://www.theperlreview.com/Interviews/mjd-hop-20050407.html http://www.theperlreview.com/Interviews/mjd-hop-20050407.htm...

gtani 15y ago

If you can wait til Apr 22 (by Amazon's release dates), there will be 2 more clojure books which I'm pretty confident will be excellent, in addition to 2 Manning books which are also great. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_9?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=clojure+programming&sprefix=clojure+p%2Cstripbooks%2C191 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_9?url=search-alias%... And you want to spend quality time in the REPL.

elangoc 15y ago

In my life, I've learned and used the following languages, in this order: Logo, Basic, Pascal, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Clojure. Each time that I learned the next language, I thought it was a great improvement on the previous, and I wondered what I had been spending my life doing with the previous language. My experience is that with Clojure is a testament to pretty much everything in "Beating the Averages" (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) It's hard to know for sure, but I have a feeling that I will end up using Clojure far much longer than the rest of those languages, combined. If you are contemplating learning a language for one-off commands and sysadmin scripts, then I kind of prefer Ruby over Python and Perl for expressiveness and readability. Most Rubyists are of the Rails persuasion, but I still have never learned Rails.

spacemanaki 15y ago

I came to Lisp via "The Little Schemer", and I recommend it for people who are new to Lisp (and/or programming). It's short and sweet, but explores some really interesting and deep ideas (recursion, higher order functions, the Y combinator, the halting problem, and interpreters). I like to think of it as "SICP lite". It won't teach you Clojure, but it will open your eyes and set you on a path to Clojure, and I think give you a very strong grounding for Lisp. At least that's what I think it gave me. On the other hand, if you really want to get up to speed on Clojure specifically, Rich Hickey's talk "Clojure for Java programmers" is a great intro to the language. I don't think you need Java experience to get something out of it, it's mostly targeted at non-Lispers without much functional programming experience. http://blip.tv/clojure/clojure-for-java-programmers-1-of-2-989128 http://blip.tv/clojure/clojure-for-java-programmers-1-of-2-9...