Again, welcome to Perl - you're gonna love it :) Just a few points to add to the sage advice already given...
- My ol' daddy used to say (back in the days when I was hassling him to buy me a ZX80) "You don't want to learn BASIC" (which was my justification for him spending the money), "you want to learn programming - that's the hard bit". Having already programmed (no matter how obscure the language), you've got a head-start. Try to think of Perl as 'just-another-language' in which you can solve tasks, rather than a completely new thing.
- Indeed - suffering should never be part of the educational experience (one of the many reasons I home-educate my children). Learning is fun. Do you know of the "Inner Game" series of books? There should be one on programming - how to take a task and turn it into a game that you just try to play better and better as you go along. I (and many others) often refer to 'research periods' as 'playing around'
- Be wary of books / teachers. Even the Camel book (which for me also is never replaced on the shelf, and I sometimes re-read for *fun*) contains the odd typo - and a lot of other books contain sheer rubbish. Remember, whoever wrote the book / is taking the class *themselves* were students (not that long ago for many), and many of them learnt from the poor books / teachers...a self-perpetuating cycle that is difficult to break. The point made earlier about having lots and lots of books / tutorials is sound, as you can then 'average out' the info - if one person's explanation seems poor, you can turn to another. Skim the bits you don't like / understand, rather than get bogged down - next time you come back to them, you'll find it a lot easier.
- Finally, learn by doing. IMHO, the 'best' programmers are the ones that taught themselves to write games in ASM in their bedrooms when they were 12. Pick a task - a fun easy task that (as logan says) you can relate to (I have my 8-yr old writing Power Rangers websites) and write it. Programming is at heart about the analysis of tasks, not syntactical manipulation, which is why the "More Than One Way" philosophy of Perl is so lovely - the language doesn't force you to leverage *your* analysis into *its* framework so much as many others do.
Best'o'luck Ben
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