I started using it in 1997. merlyn can attest to "tecmaster" from bergen.org logging onto EFnet #perl and asking questions that got me kicked. I was "Jeff, the teaching teen perl hacker", I believe.

Why did I learn Perl? Because my school personal web site's "search engine" consisted of a textarea whose contents were emailed to me when the user clicked the "submit" button. I would then email them back telling them what pages were good for the content they were looking for. (Yecch.) So I learned Perl so I could write a search engine-type thing.

That summer, I got a job at my high school writing admin scripts in Perl. I took off from there.

I learned Perl sitting at Barnes & Noble reading the camel because I had no money to buy it; I didn't need a terminal near me to test things... I absorbed Perl pretty easily. Now, I believe I have somewhere around 10 Perl books.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.