4 ms·

Learning Perl the Hard Way

18 points by mbrubeck 17y ago

dmv 17y ago
Interesting -- a GNU Free Documentation alternative book on starting perl for practisioners. However, the page looks stale. The PDF is (c) 2003, so unless this is a recent re-release under the GNU Free Documentation License, we may not see: the LaTeX source code (with figures and a Makefile) will be available soon.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Yes, and 2003's "modern" style is what we call "bad" style these days. A lot has changed in 6 years.
  - 321abc 17y ago
    Like what?
rjurney 17y ago
There's an easy way? :)
- 321abc 17y ago
  Randal Schwartz's "Learning Perl" was one of the easiest and most entertaining introductions to any language I've ever read.
  - rjurney 17y ago
    Yes, that book is great. Just a joke about Perl's relative syntactic obscurity. I love me some Perl because of the elegance and power the operators provide me, but its murder on a noob, especially if its not great code.
    - 321abc 17y ago
      The same could be said of any language. Perl's just gotten beat up on by fans of certain other upstart languages that want to steal some of Perl's glory. In five or ten years there'll be some other language fad, and those languages will get their turn at being the whipping boy.
      - rjurney 17y ago
        The same could be said of... LISP. But few languages are as syntacticly confusing as Perl are to the uninitiated. Thats just how it is, eh?
        321abc 17y ago
        Whether it's "confusing" is entirely subjective. I found Perl's syntax quite straightforward, having already been familiar with shell scripts, regular expressions, and sed (not to mention a variety of other languages I'd learned). But I suppose I was not your typical newbie programmer when I started learning Perl. Maybe Perl wouldn't make for the ideal first language, but it's certainly not nearly as difficult as assembly, certain functional languages, or even C/C++.
      - berntb 17y ago
        >and [Python, Ruby] will get their turn at being the whipping boy. I don't know about that. I think a large reason for the fan boys' FUD against Perl is that the three languages are quite similar. Competition. Edit: What I mean is, the coming new languages will probably be quite different and fill different ecological niches. You can make a good argument that today with Moose/CPAN etc, Perl 5 is hard-to-beat as a development environment. The main disadvantage IMHO is that it is a lot to learn. I really don't know what good can be said about PHP though, which is eating all three's lunch. (-: What was Larry Wall's quote? "Takes worse is better to new depths". :-)
        321abc 17y ago
        According to this graph of job ads over the last five years, PHP is more popular than Python and Ruby, but only half as popular as Perl: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+php&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...
cschep 17y ago
Any reasons for a newbie to learn Perl instead of Python these days?
- eugenejen 17y ago
  No. But it enables a newbie to deal with some legacy code inside his/her box by others. Just like learning latin/greek expands your horizon.
- 321abc 17y ago
  Here are some reasons for you: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby&#38... Python and Ruby aren't nearly as popular as Perl. CPAN, Perl's repository of libraries, is gigantic, having most everything you can think of already in it; which makes writing new programs much, much easier. As much as Ruby and Python fanboys love to beat up on Perl, their favorite languages have their uglyness and their own faults (which you'll rarely hear them mention). However, their propaganda really has worked on a lot of people that really don't know any better. So my impression is that a lot of the newer stuff is being written for Ruby and Python. So it would probably pay to learn them for that, if nothing else. But I would definitely think twice before choosing them instead of Perl.
  - ubernostrum 17y ago
    On the topic of propaganda and people who don't know better... Once upon a time (five years ago or so) I did Perl professionally. At first I bought into the CPAN hype -- everything's there! Any library you'll ever need has already been written and is in the CPAN! -- but after actually using it for a while, I learned that Sturgeon's Law has no exceptions. There were so many packages which were broken, uninstallable, non-functional or nearly undocumented that trying to use stuff from CPAN could end up involving more time than just writing from scratch. When, one day, I encountered documentation for one project which listed all its dependencies, and then gave a long list of things it needed which were in CPAN but in such broken states that CPAN couldn't actually be used to install them (and an even longer list of instructions for how to manually install and work through the bugs), I started looking for something else.

18 points by mbrubeck 17y ago

dmv 17y ago

Interesting -- a GNU Free Documentation alternative book on starting perl for practisioners. However, the page looks stale. The PDF is (c) 2003, so unless this is a recent re-release under the GNU Free Documentation License, we may not see: the LaTeX source code (with figures and a Makefile) will be available soon.

jrockway 17y ago
Yes, and 2003's "modern" style is what we call "bad" style these days. A lot has changed in 6 years.
- 321abc 17y ago
  Like what?

rjurney 17y ago

There's an easy way? :)

321abc 17y ago
Randal Schwartz's "Learning Perl" was one of the easiest and most entertaining introductions to any language I've ever read.
- rjurney 17y ago
  Yes, that book is great. Just a joke about Perl's relative syntactic obscurity. I love me some Perl because of the elegance and power the operators provide me, but its murder on a noob, especially if its not great code.
  - 321abc 17y ago
    The same could be said of any language. Perl's just gotten beat up on by fans of certain other upstart languages that want to steal some of Perl's glory. In five or ten years there'll be some other language fad, and those languages will get their turn at being the whipping boy.
    - rjurney 17y ago
      The same could be said of... LISP. But few languages are as syntacticly confusing as Perl are to the uninitiated. Thats just how it is, eh?
      - 321abc 17y ago
        Whether it's "confusing" is entirely subjective. I found Perl's syntax quite straightforward, having already been familiar with shell scripts, regular expressions, and sed (not to mention a variety of other languages I'd learned). But I suppose I was not your typical newbie programmer when I started learning Perl. Maybe Perl wouldn't make for the ideal first language, but it's certainly not nearly as difficult as assembly, certain functional languages, or even C/C++.
    - berntb 17y ago
      >and [Python, Ruby] will get their turn at being the whipping boy. I don't know about that. I think a large reason for the fan boys' FUD against Perl is that the three languages are quite similar. Competition. Edit: What I mean is, the coming new languages will probably be quite different and fill different ecological niches. You can make a good argument that today with Moose/CPAN etc, Perl 5 is hard-to-beat as a development environment. The main disadvantage IMHO is that it is a lot to learn. I really don't know what good can be said about PHP though, which is eating all three's lunch. (-: What was Larry Wall's quote? "Takes worse is better to new depths". :-)
      - 321abc 17y ago
        According to this graph of job ads over the last five years, PHP is more popular than Python and Ruby, but only half as popular as Perl: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+php&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby%2C+...

cschep 17y ago

Any reasons for a newbie to learn Perl instead of Python these days?

eugenejen 17y ago
No. But it enables a newbie to deal with some legacy code inside his/her box by others. Just like learning latin/greek expands your horizon.
321abc 17y ago
Here are some reasons for you: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=perl%2C+python%2C+ruby&#38... Python and Ruby aren't nearly as popular as Perl. CPAN, Perl's repository of libraries, is gigantic, having most everything you can think of already in it; which makes writing new programs much, much easier. As much as Ruby and Python fanboys love to beat up on Perl, their favorite languages have their uglyness and their own faults (which you'll rarely hear them mention). However, their propaganda really has worked on a lot of people that really don't know any better. So my impression is that a lot of the newer stuff is being written for Ruby and Python. So it would probably pay to learn them for that, if nothing else. But I would definitely think twice before choosing them instead of Perl.
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  On the topic of propaganda and people who don't know better... Once upon a time (five years ago or so) I did Perl professionally. At first I bought into the CPAN hype -- everything's there! Any library you'll ever need has already been written and is in the CPAN! -- but after actually using it for a while, I learned that Sturgeon's Law has no exceptions. There were so many packages which were broken, uninstallable, non-functional or nearly undocumented that trying to use stuff from CPAN could end up involving more time than just writing from scratch. When, one day, I encountered documentation for one project which listed all its dependencies, and then gave a long list of things it needed which were in CPAN but in such broken states that CPAN couldn't actually be used to install them (and an even longer list of instructions for how to manually install and work through the bugs), I started looking for something else.