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Help with Perl Tutorials 5

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Lesiba5

IS-IT--Management
Sep 19, 2003
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I want to learn Perl and CGI but the problem is that I cannot find the best Tutorials I can use online Can someone help
 
I just learned PERL and I found this link to
be EXTREMELY useful. While it did not make me an expert, I was able to write a script that took form data, massaged it, then sent it off to a coupla email addresses.

Again, I will NEVER be a perl expert, but it really helped me get started.

Good Luck!
 
Thanks guys, I was about to ask the same question. I'm just getting into Perl and started reading O'Reilly's Learning Perl book, which IMO really blows. Its *extremely* boring and doesn't seem like its written for people with no programming experience. The one good thing about O'Reilly's book is that is seemed to cure my insomnia! I start reading it every day before I go to sleep and I'm sleeping like a baby after reading a page or two.

ChrisP
RHCE, LPIC-1, CCNA, CNE, MCSE, +10 others
 
Fluid,

If you want to read a book that is written for absolute programming beginners, but will actually teach you something useful in a relatively short period of time, I would recommend "Sams Teach Yourself Perl 5 in 21 Day". That was the book I started with and I really enjoyed it. I picked up "Learning Perl" afterwards. Although LP has helped me refine my skills, I can say for sure that I never would have learned anything about perl if it was my first book. Too advanced for a complete beginner.
 
Ditto on raklet's suggestion of "Sams Teach Yourself Perl 5 in 21 Days". I also found that book to be very effective as I learned the crude basics.

After you have a few of the basics, the O'Reilly books are invaluable. In the beginning, though, I found that many of the examples in 'Learning Perl' broke a basic rule of programming, they obfuscated the meaning of the example by including little tricks or assumptions that a beginner won't easily understand.

For about 6 months, I used the Sams book regularly. Then, for the past 5 years, I have used the O'Reilly books (several of them) all the time.

'hope this helps

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Thanks guys. I just picked up the Sams book. It looks like a much easier read than the O'Reilly LP book. The thing I hated about the O'Reilly book is that they don't provide any real world examples on anything and they just throw you into new subjects without thoroughly explaining anything. They'll give you the definition for a term, and then just start using the term from that point on like its nothing new and you've been using it for years. That book definitely assumes that you know at least one other language. This Sams book looks much better, so I'll start with that, and then finish the O'Reilly book afterward. I'm sure the O'Reilly book will be a good reference for AFTER I know what I'm doing.

BTW, the reason I'm learning Perl is so that I can write sysadmin scripts for *nix, and to possibly pick up some basic CGI skills.

ChrisP
RHCE, LPIC-1, CCNA, CNE, MCSE, +10 others
 
Chris,

You are on the right road. Perl has been an invaluable tool in windows systems administration. I am sure it will be equally valuable (if not more so) on *nix. I am sure you will like the Sams books. It has lots of hand on examples to play with as you move through the chapters. The only recommendation I would have is that you actually type the examples in and run them and then play with changing them to see what other things you can do. Don't just read them in the book and think "Oh, that's nice. I will remember that for later" - because you won't. You have to be curious about pushing the boundaries from the start. Take the things that you will learn from Sam's and look for things that might be relevant on a *nix system. See if you can write some scripts with the the things you learned in the chapters. I think you will be surprised at how fast you pick it up. Perl was my very first programming language, but while working through Sams, I wrote some useful scripts for my job within the first week of reading the book.

Best wishes,

Tyler
 
Cool, sounds good. I already have a bunch of ideas for scripts that would be very useful to me in my daily work as (mostly) a Linux sysadmin. I'm sure Perl will be able to handle them one way or another. I'll be back asking some more questions once I get into this book I'm sure.

Thanks,

ChrisP
RHCE, LPIC-1, CCNA, CNE, MCSE, +10 others
 
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