Learning Perl

I've learned that one of the tools that I'm expected to have under my belt as a system administrator is Perl, which is used for managing all kinds of things. I'm not a programmer, and many of the concepts of programming languages are new to me. I've always assumed that knowing HTML and its variants gave me enough background to understand computer languages like Perl or Java or C++, and they do to a small degree. For instance, when I first found the "view source" option on Internet Explorer a number of years ago and it opened a text file with all that code, I really had no idea what it was or what it did. Graduate school changed this, and by the end of my third technology/web-oriented class, I was writing papers that analyzed the HTML of major corporate web sites. Knowing those skills gave me the confidence (hubris?) to believe that I actually know what makes computers behave the way they do.

Then I found Linux . . .

Aside from the obvious cosmetic and ideological differences between Linux and Microsoft (which is really the only other milieu I'm comfortable in at this point), Linux (based on Unix) requires use of the command line in a way that Microsoft does not. So even though I do most of my work and play in my (very pretty) GUI, I am using the command line more and more. I'm much less afraid of it than I was. The most extensive shell work I've done so far was installing the Evergreen ILS server, but I'm still learning on this (more for a later post).

Okay, back to Perl. I've so far been using two books to get the basics down:

• Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours (3rd ed.) by Clinton Pierce
• Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (2nd ed.) by Laura Lemay

I used the second book for a few days, but I found that the 24 Hours book was more clear in its tone and a bit less scattered as far as subject matter goes. As I investigate Perl further, I can see that there are two books that kind of everybody uses and talks about (even if they don't love them, exactly):

• Learning Perl (the "llama") by Randal Schwartz, et al.
• Programming Perl (the "camel") by Larry Wall, et al.

I have ordered copies from Amazon that should be here very soon. There are actually previous editions available through the GALILEO subscription to netLibrary (if you're not from Georgia, investigate your library's online options), but I've decided that these are worth owning since I'm now pretty serious about learning Perl.

There are also, as you might expect, many online resources for learning Perl. The most extensive and comprehensive is the actual "perldoc" documentation, which is included in any distribution of Perl, but I find to be much more readable on the web (they also allow you to export pages as PDF documents for easy printing). The other advantage to this approach is that, like Perl itself, the documentation is modular, and I can do a close reading of any given section in a short amount of time.

I have also joined the Perl Monks website, which is forum-based and seems to carry a level of fanaticism that a newbie like me can't quite comprehend yet. But as I progress, I intend to use and reference those forums.