[Techtalk] Ruby/Perl Tutorials

[Anne Wainwright]

Hello, Bethany,

My ha'porth - from someone with minimal perl skills.

On Wed, 14 Apr 2010 08:49:16 -0400
Bethany Seeger <seeger at prosensing.com> wrote:


> perform some minor function.   What looks good on a resume?

Well, maybe what you might come across more often in the sort of
environment you intend to work in would be a more appropriate question.

If you were working in a in an established 'nix environment you would
surely meet miles of lines of perl scripts there. It is also ubiquitous
on the web whatever other languages grab the limelight at present. Even
if not the 'flavour of the moment' perl has serious power, and the CPAN
repository of perl modules is matched by but nothing. Nobody said that
it was the easiest, but then it surely isn't the most difficult. It is
very versatile.

No one ever got overlooked for having perl on their resume, and since
you won't be able to soak up enough of a new language in a few weeks to
fool an interviewer who might be skilled in that particular language,
then plan for a longer term relationship with your chosen partner.

All of the o'reilly perl books are good, and I note the following from
a 2006 article which is still relevant (and which you might read).

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=526866

--------------------------
Recent Bookscan stats show Perl at roughly three times the number of
sales as Python, ten times as Ruby, and half as many as PHP.

O'Reilly Media is very much driven by numbers and they felt the Perl
book market was strong enough that they published 4 new Perl titles
last summer alone. That is a large number of books for a relatively
small tech publisher to devote to a single language. 
---------------------------

Somebody has to be reading all those books, and it isn't the local book
club ladies either!

bestest
Anne