[Courses] [Basics] Lesson #0

[L J Laubenheimer]

Liz Young wrote:
> 
[snip]
> I have exprerience with Windows scripting (self taught) -- DOS batch,
> Winbatch, NT Shell scripting, VBS -- used for system administration and
> software distribution in prior employments.

Sounds familiar... BASIC, DOS batch, VBA, 123 macros, etc.

> I have five Perl books, but nothing to show for it.  Picked Perl for
> it's cross-platform and free-ness, but can't seem to grok what I need
> to do anything. 

Whereas I took to perl like a duck to water. ;)  I guess it helped 
that I found the one "teach yourself" book that was perfect for me.

> I was glancing at Python for the same reasons (x-plat.
> and free) when this class announcement came by.  TCL looks neat, so I'm
> going for it.   I like anything that has "tool" in it's name ;-)

I have a love/hate relationship with TCL.  Love because of the 
"Expect" add-on, the functionality of which didn't exist in Perl at 
the time (it does now..).  Hate because the bracketing and variable 
handling made shell scripting seem intuitive, and the function 
names are just bizarre - like a foreign language.  "puts"

But TCL is also cross platform.  I have a CD from scriptics with a 
Windows version on it.

> And, I guess that means I can't just lurk around here anymore.

;) me neither...

					Linda