Accidentally stumble upon the challenge while searching for Perl's mailing lists and blogs.
I have always wanted to pick up a programming language. To buck up my system administration skill by scripting daily routines and system monitoring. And most importantly, write some web application with this much fascinated programming language that is well known for its TMTOWTDI (There's more than one way to do it !!!) flexibility.
This is my first post on the Ironman Challenge.
Why did I pick up the Challenge? A way to force myself to document what i have learn and also reminder myself to practice more. 1 post every week but no more then 10 days in between. I'll have to cough up with something i've learn, and i must learn. :p
At the same time, hopefully someone can spot what i have been missing or did wrong during my learning process. All constructive comments and suggestion is much appreciated.
Currently, i am working on converting the bash scripts i have, to perl. Reason to do so is getting a chance to familiarize myself with perl, with a goal. With this purpose, at least i don't bang around like a headless fly. Also, i think my bash scripts are some fast & dirty approach to accomplish things, which i think "use strict;" & "use warnings;" can fix/correct most of it. After a few days or so meddling around, manage to try out some condition & loop statements, date/time functions, database connections modules & some array operations. Huh, this is one topic for blogging.
At this stage, I am still trying to get around the documentation, perldoc. Most of the time, i'll be browsing "perldoc perltoc" to find out which functions and/or modules i can use. Still trying to figure out how to search for modules or functions.
CPAN. Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. There's definitely something for me to use, so that i don't have to "re-invent" the wheel. This is another nature of me, laziness. Re-using other people's code not only fulfill my laziness, but also make me write shorter code to accomplish my task.
The next post i will be talking about how to install & use modules.
That's all for now...
Adios !!!
Posts
6 comments:
Welcome to the Challenge!
If you are going to post next about using and installing modules via cpan, which I gather from your text, you should really take a look at the cpan module local::lib (http://search.cpan.org/dist/local-lib/) which is a tool that lets you easily localize your cpan installs in a target directory of choice (typically in your home directory or associated with an application). This tool helps a lot when you don't have root access or just want to separate your system and development perls. I use it even on my home boxes since it makes it easier to make sure I am properly tracking dependencies.
Hi John,
Thanks for the suggestion. Just check out the documentation over CPAN, it seems to be very useful if the setup is for multiple development. It's also useful if i am writing some program on a hosting environment, especially shared hosting environment. I'll leave it for later when i am starting my web application development.
Thanks though :)
Since you are interested in cleaning up your style of programming you will probably find Perl::Critic (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Perl-Critic/lib/Perl/Critic.pm) very useful.
good to take the challenge!
Dude, wanna join me? :p
Hi Chas,
Thanks for the tips. Will try it tonight. :)
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