Learning Perl

[thejnaitor]

Hey everybody,

I'm taking a perl class in college this semester and I am having a very hard time understanding it so far. I have read all the relevant chapters in the book I've got for the course (the Llama O'Reilly book for Perl), and have checked out some tutorials online, but it's still not sticking.

Do any of you have a good resource you know of for learning Perl? If so, please share it. I will be ever so grateful.

 

[KLin]

http://www.perl.com
http://www.perl.org

 

[geecee]

In addition to perl.org/perl.com, if you're running a Windows PC, you can pull down the free perl package at Activestate.com. Once it's installed, you have access to a whole slew of html docs on perl. There's some good stuff in there if you dig a little and you'll have it all sitting locally on your pc.

 

[ivol07]

Originally posted by: geecee
In addition to perl.org/perl.com, if you're running a Windows PC, you can pull down the free perl package at Activestate.com. Once it's installed, you have access to a whole slew of html docs on perl. There's some good stuff in there if you dig a little and you'll have it all sitting locally on your pc.

I agree with this. Install Activestate Perl on yor machine and then just start writing some code and running it. Good luck.

Oh, I saw this on Digg the other day:

Learn Perl in 10 easy lessons

 

[IronWing]

I third the ActiveState perl install. It is worth it (okay, it is free) but it is worth it just for the help files.

I heart perl.

 

[Skeeedunt]

print $${@#perl[owns]->{joo}}

 

[Atheus]

Don't read books, just write code.

 

[thejnaitor]

Thanks for the good input and the info about ActiveState and the digg link guys. I'll check that stuff out and see if it helps. Thanks a ton! I really appreciate it.

 

[esun]

I personally like using Cygwin and/or Ubuntu for writing perl. The UNIX environment is just really cohesive with perl. If you're interested in Cygwin, here's a link: http://www.cygwin.com/

For using Ubuntu, I run it in VMWare Workstation (VMWare Server also works).

As for learning perl, I agree with others that writing code is perhaps the fastest way to learn. Start simple: Fibonacci numbers, prime numbers (will test basic syntax); finding unique items from a list (hint: hash); do the same but take the items from an external file (file manipulation); then try some regular expressions. That should get you started.