Battening Down Hatches

japhy — Thu, 22 Feb 2001 16:52:55 +0000

If you want to brush up on your Perl skills, there are several approaches you can take:

Online Tutorials: There are a multitude of tutorials out there on Perl.
Price: Free.
Quality: Varies greatly, because the abilities of the authors vary greatly.
Verdict: Maybe as a spring-board to getting back into Perl, but don't rely on them alone.
Other People's Code: Download some programs, peruse the source, and hack.
Price: Free.
Quality: Varies as wildly as the tutorials.
Verdict: This is probably not something you want to put on your resume -- "Learned Perl by hacking Matt Wright's Message Board!"
Perl Books: O'Reilly, Manning, and Addison-Weseley put forth some great literature on Perl.
Price: Not free. Usually $20-$40 per book.
Quality: Very, very good, if you get it from the right sources. The publishers mentioned above publish Perl books written by the maintainers of Perl itself, and the main developers in its community (Randal Schwartz, Mark-Jason Dominus, Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington, Damian Conway, and, of course, Larry Wall).
Verdict: I believe I have the complete library of O'Reilly Perl books (save one or two, that would be of no use to me), and they are invaluable. And most of them are humorous and fun to read, besides.
The Perl Docs: You probably already have them, and they're online in a dozen places.
Price: Free.
Quality: They're an incredibly comprehensive set of documents. They're written by the people that write those books I love. They're excellent.
Verdict: But perhaps they're not the best for learning from -- they're more suited for reference. But your mileage may vary. If you're programming with Perl, you owe it yourself and ANYONE you ask for help from to be familiar with the standard documentation. There's no excuse not to be. These docs will save you (and us) a lot of time.
Newsgroups, Mailing Lists, Forums, Communities, IRC: People online that take time to help.
Price: Free.
Quality: Varies wildly. Some mailing lists are full of people that don't know much at all (blind leading the blind). But there are several lists, forums, communities, and IRC channels out there that are frequented by very knowledgeable and helpful folk (like the authors from above). "Lurking", the act of sitting quietly and listening for weeks, is a very useful tool -- it also makes you aware of the community's customs, as it were.
Verdict: I strongly suggest you check out the following: Perl Guru (http://www.perlguru.com/), Perl Monks (http://www.perlmonks.org/), and EFnet and DALnet IRC #perl (EFnet #perl has a web site at http://pound.perl.org/, and DALnet #perl has a web site at http://www.dalnet-perl.org/). I participate in each of these places, and they are very useful.

As far as writing GUIs, you probably want to look at Perl/Tk, the Toolkit interface for Perl.