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Re: Forgetting Syntax, Forgetting logic, Heck, Should I even try keep learning Perl??

by bitingduck (Chaplain)
on Dec 15, 2012 at 16:29 UTC ( [id://1008996]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Forgetting Syntax, Forgetting logic, Heck, Should I even try keep learning Perl??

I'll second what iguanodon recommended, but recommend that you pick a larger problem. A friend of mine refers to it as the "search for why". It's much easier to learn something new if you have an itch that you have to scratch or a particular problem that you have to solve, and for which the new thing looks like the correct tool

Something I used to do whenever I wanted to learn a new language was write an implementation of John Conway's life. Perl is one of the few where I haven't done that, and I recently saw a post here where it was very impressively done in just a few lines.

I started learning Perl in my late 30's, about your age, because there was some web stuff I wanted to do and Perl looked like the right tool. I spent a bunch of time getting up to speed with Perl and MySQL and web things, having had no prior experience with web things, but quite a bit of scientific and data acquisition/analysis programming. I learned a ton, and then ended up applying a lot of what I learned to a Ruby implementation (which was also new to me) that I eventually got up and running. Since then I'm using both Perl and Ruby for another, bigger project.

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Re^2: Forgetting Syntax, Forgetting logic, Heck, Should I even try keep learning Perl??
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 18, 2012 at 20:48 UTC

    I was also 50++ when I first got serious about learning Perl. The worst part was going back and forth across languages. If / test syntax is different for Perl vs. ksh vs. Oracle (my "native tongue"). When substringing, some languages use start_byte,length; others use start_byte, end_byte.

    It got a whole lot easier when I decided that, for a while, I'd simply do everything in Perl. So I second the idea that you should try to stop writing shell scripts and create Perl scripts instead.

    What type of scripts? Hey, you're a storage admin. Start by creating some scripts that mimic the reporting that EMC / Promise / Sun / whomever have for their disk-carving tool. Create a script into which you can put a slice name, and verify that it's not already allocated to a LUN. Create a script that goes out and identifies slices which are no longer associated with a LUN (maybe their server's being rebuilt). In other words, think about cool tools that'd make your life easier. That's what I did to handle Oracle alert logs, listener logs, /var/adm/message, etc. It works pretty well because all the work you do in Perl saves you from getting headaches outside Perl.

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