Worth learning Perl?

[ChimpMaster]

I have an opportunity to pick up some Perl scripting skills here at this client. It will be in addition to my main skillset (but not at all complimentary).

As I now nothing about Perl, I was wondering if anyone here had insight into how useful it is to know and whether there is a market for it, especially as a standalone skill?

[miffy]

As I now nothing about Perl

know

[DaveB]

I have an opportunity to pick up some Perl scripting skills here at this client. It will be in addition to my main skillset (but not at all complimentary).

As I now nothing about Perl, I was wondering if anyone here had insight into how useful it is to know and whether there is a market for it, especially as a standalone skill?

No real use as a standalone, but many sysadmins swear by it for knocking up scripts to do routine jobs. Perl has a huge fanbase and there are a vast amount of resources out there for it. If you need to do something with a pearl script then google for it first, chances are someone has already written it.

[miffy]

It'll be interesting to see the answers to this...

I use it for formatting logs and messing about with files and reports. Not much else. It's useful for admins.

[TheFaQQer]

No real use as a standalone, but many sysadmins swear by it for knocking up scripts to do routine jobs. Perl has a huge fanbase and there are a vast amount of resources out there for it. If you need to do something with a pearl script then google for it first, chances are someone has already written it.

perl

[barry_abs]

i love perl, have been using it for all sorts of general development, data manipulation, sysadmin etc. tasks for about 6 years.. it's cross-platform, so you can use it anywhere..

i initially fell in love with the shorthand idioms (quick to write), it's regular expressions (long before .NET implemented them), the vast community (perlmonks a fave site), efficiency etc.. it's a real master at what it does best: data extraction, reporting etc.

recently though, i've been turning to ruby where i'd normally have used perl.. just checking it out at the moment - it's natively OO, which attracted me.. perl 6 is taking a while, innit..

[TheFaQQer]

I have an opportunity to pick up some Perl scripting skills here at this client. It will be in addition to my main skillset (but not at all complimentary).

As I now nothing about Perl, I was wondering if anyone here had insight into how useful it is to know and whether there is a market for it, especially as a standalone skill?

Doesn't seem to be tricky from what I've seen before. Might just be another string to the bow that might appeal to some projects.

[b0redom]

PERL is easyish to pick up, but there are many many different ways of doing stuff, and picking up someone else's code could be a potential nightmare.

[Burrow01]

I have an opportunity to pick up some Perl scripting skills here at this client. It will be in addition to my main skillset (but not at all complimentary).

As I now nothing about Perl, I was wondering if anyone here had insight into how useful it is to know and whether there is a market for it, especially as a standalone skill?

If it's in there time it's always worth it, you never know when it might swing another position if you have it in addtion

Pete

[Flat Eric]

<RANT >
Python is the way forward..

I have about 9 applications running on my linux server which are written in python..

Guess how many I have running written in perl.... ZERO.

These aren't my my python applications, they are system processes (I'm using Fedora 7).

Have you ever seen a perl script which does anything remotely interesting.. It's a case study in obfuscation

</RANT >