[Techtalk] Ruby/Perl Tutorials

[Cynthia Kiser]

If you have "always wanted to learn it" that seems an excellent reason
to learn Perl. Your field sounds a bit like astronomy. My roommate
works as a ground system engineer for smallish NASA astronomy missions
and does a lot of C and IDL - all glued together by a lot of Perl.

If you feel like dipping your toe in other waters, Python is a pretty
good choice because of the SciPy libraries: http://www.scipy.org/

Personally I like Ruby - but mostly because of Rails AND because the
Ruby community does a lot of creating domain-specific languages. If
you are interested in Ruby, I don't like either of the books
recommended for learning it. The one I liked was Dave Black's The
Well-Grounded Rubyist - but then I have been a Dave Black fan since
reading The Pragmatic Programmer 10 years ago.

Bottom line is you probably can't go wrong. Dip your toe in the water
and see what you think. I have done a smidge of Python and Perl but
find if I have to guess what a method will be called, I couldn't. When
I was about the same amount into Ruby, somehow my guesses about syntax
and method names just worked. 

P.S. If you are looking for a book that will help you make the
conceptual leap from more formal compiled programs to scripting, you
might want to grab a copy of Everyday Scripting in Ruby.
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/bmsft/everyday-scripting-with-ruby
I do web programming for a living - and relatively little free-form
scripting. I picked up a copy of this to help a non-programming friend
who needed to script some testing. I learned a TON from this book
about how to construct scripts with named parameters, input checking,
etc. 

-- 
Cynthia N. Kiser
cnk at ugcs.caltech.edu