Learn perl

[Goya]

I could do with learning perl - any tips?!

I've no programming experience. I just need to understand\write perl scripts and do stuff like data manipulation, insert stuff into files during a process, etc, etc.

I did a search on this forum & found a similar post, but this was from 2003. Just wondered if anyone had something a little more up to date?

[DaveB]

just google for perl tutorials. There are loads out there that go from first principles to complex problems. Perl is actually really easy once you get your head round it and work out how the regex's work.

[AtW]

Perl is dieing slowly but surely - and this comes from person who used Perl since around 1997 and I am a member of a local Perl User Group: use Python or something like this for scripting, though probably for throw away scripts Perl will be okay for another decade.

[Bright Spark]

Your probably better off learning php, It has a very large community and libraries with recent versions of php (4.3.0) you can create shell scripts.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php

for php documentation visit:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php

[Cowboy Bob]

Your probably better off learning php, It has a very large community and libraries with recent versions of php (4.3.0) you can create shell scripts.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php

for php documentation visit:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php

http://www.php-security.org/

The maintainers of the language seem reluctant to patch a lot of the security bugs...

[cottonfoo]

PHP could not be more different from Perl, and if I found someone had written some "shell" scripts in PHP I'd let them go Perl has CPAN too (which I might argue is getting TOO big), PHP's library sites can't compare.

I wouldn't say Perl was dying (there are a lot of quite good projects around for development, Catalyst as a Rails implementation, DBIx::Class as an ORM, Template Toolkit etc), but I would say that if you wanted to look for work using these skills, there's perhaps more likelihood of getting a Perl job than a Python one. If you're writing new stuff, go for whatever you prefer.

Get O'Reilly's "Learning Perl", that's a good way to start. There are a lot of tutorials online but a lot of them seem to have the quality of an online JavaScript resource, which is saying something bad. The problem is, it's difficult for a first timer to spot a bad tutorial. There may be some stuff on perl.com and perl.org that will help.

Steve.

[Stan]

Read and understand the O'Reilly book "Learning Perl", the step after that is "programming perl" tho I understand it might have had a name change.

They are decent books that should tell you what you want to know.

In an ideal world I would choose ruby HOWEVER perl is much more likely to be approved for or already installed on client's servers so it is well worth knowing.

[Goya]

Cheers for the info. Perl is already used at existing customer sites, on different platforms (mainly Solaris, Linux & Windows), so Perl is the only option currently.

Just ordered a book "Elements of Programming with Perl". Had a look at "Learning Perl", but i think the elements one may be a little better tailored to my complete lack of programming knowledge!