[Techtalk] Ruby/Perl Tutorials

John.Sturdy John.Sturdy at ul.ie
Wed Apr 14 14:40:31 UTC 2010


> What looks good on a resume?
> Perl vs. Python vs. Ruby...

I think that what looks best on a resume is a good range of skills, rather than any one specific language or combination of languages.  If it looks like learning yet another language isn't going to be an issue for you, IMHO a good potential employer shouldn't worry if you don't have the one that's part of their in-house culture.  OTOH resumes can be filtered by non-technical HR people who don't necessarily think this way.

That being said, see my reply to the next section:

> I realize Perl is older and way more complicated.  Maybe over kill for 
> most things I want to do.  Or at least not a very good choice.

As a Lisp person, I'm inclined to think there's nothing wrong with older languages as such!  Reading a resume with Perl near the top of the list tells me "here's a heavy-duty working geek who can learn things not designed specially to be easy to learn".  Of course, it's not necessary to use all the complicated bits of Perl all the time, and there is an "Enlightened Perl" movement (http://www.enlightenedperl.org/about.html)

> a script to manipulate data, or just perform some minor function.

If the "minor function" is a part of your personal workflow, rather than some scripted part of a system that you're not sitting in front of as it runs, I'll add a less common suggestion: Emacs-Lisp.  It's by far the most interactive way to munge data, and it's about as good as Perl at regular expressions (at least, near enough for any requirements I've seen).

But, that's drifting off the topic of Ruby and Perl tutorials.

For an experienced programmer, I'd suggest the quickest approach is to dive directly into the Perl documentation, e.g. at http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl/pod/perlsyn.pod, taking it along with a sample program -- perhaps find a program to modify.  I think most Perl users I've known have learnt it by osmosis rather than through a book!  It's a bit like the von Neumann quote about maths: "in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."  And that's the way I've found it to be with Perl.

__John


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