[Techtalk] On Perl

[kansas_kennedy at phreaker.net]

At 08:11 PM 7/27/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 19:44, jennyw wrote:
> > Of course, one of Perl's mottos is "there's more than one way to do it".
> > This is something Perl people love and others (e.g. Python people) hate.
> > ;-) This means there are endless permutations on how you could have
> > written the code, and some people will be more partial to some versions.
>
>This drove/drives me crazy and was a huge obstacle in my initial
>learning of the language.  The last time I wrote a program before I
>picked up perl was <mumble> years ago and it was in _fortran_.  It took
>me a few months to get a grip on writing things in perl.
>
>A book that helped me a lot was Elizabeth Castro's _Perl and CGI for the
>World Wide Web_, even though I wasn't writing cgi.  The format is very
>"friendly" and she sticks with pretty much the same style throughout the
>book.
>
>gabrielle

TIMTOWDI (There is more than one way to do it) makes Perl much harder and 
much complex. A popular belief about Perl is that it is very easy to learn 
and buying two books Learning and Programming Perl will make you a guru 
from a total newbie. But this statement is false. I made a big mistake 
buying those two books. Learning Perl (2nd ed) is not really written for 
total newbies who has never been in programming before. From the very first 
few chapters (I think from 2nd chapter) it asks you to read man pages that 
will only make you feel sleepy or question your ability. Contrary to the 
popular belief, Perl is harder to learn. In fact, I didn't face this much 
trouble when I learned C in school.