From the perl man page (back when it was all one page) When I was a student I took an internship at a small software company in the English countryside. I was

From the perl man page (back when it was all one page) When I was a student I took an internship at a small software company in the English countryside. I was given the task of fixing 100 or so Oracle Forms (version 3, still based on green screen technology). A field in the database was being resized from 1 to 2 characters, and I had to fix the display layouts and any related variable declarations in the code. The Oracle forms editor had a terrible UI, I had to navigate around the form and drill down in each block or UI element to see the related code. There's wasn't much of a search facility. After a bit I decided there had to be a better way. I started by grepping the forms files, to see where the code was referenced. This helped, but didn't tell me where in the form the code was, so I still had to navigate around the form looking for the places it was used. I'm not sure why I picked up on perl, but I printed out 90-odd pages from man, spent some time reading through, and came up with a script that did a high-level parse of all the form files and told me which forms and code blocks contained references to the field. The other developers thought that this task would keep the intern distracted for a few weeks, but I finished within a few days. So they game me another pile of more complex changes to do. Sigh... Other than that the Camel book is good, and the perl Cookbook.