I can haz perl!

[nancylebov]

Perl is running on my computer! At this point I've just run some elementary programs from Learning Perl, but I'm planning to work through the book, then onwards to Programming Perl.

Why Perl? Because my website is written in it, and I need to add features.

I'm not sure what language would be more sensible in general, though people seem to like Python.

As might be expected for any project, my impulse is to buy more books. There seems to be a classic on debugging conveniently called Debugging, but a fast search doesn't turn up anything on the general principles of documentation. Does such a thing exist?

Addendum: mnemex very generously wrote my website. These days, he fixes it when it breaks but doesn't have time for development.

Addendum the second: Another possibility is going to osCommerce, free commercial website software with a good reputation, but at the moment, perl seems more interesting.

Comments

[darius.livejournal.com]

The Practice of Programming (http://books.google.com/books?id=to6M9_dbjosC&dq=the+practice+of+programming) is excellent, though it has no special chapter on documentation.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[asim.livejournal.com]

For Perl, I think the best recent book is Conway's Perl Best Practices. It's basically a book on how to apply many of the general programming lessons in other works to the idioms of Perl, while working around same to produce more readable and usable code. It's actually been a help with working with many other languages, as well!

Highly recommended.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thank you. It looks very promising, and I've ordered it.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

It's not a great starting point, though -- the principles given shouldn't be applied blindly, and one needs some understanding of the language to know what to apply when.

Learning Perl is the canonical starting point; Programming Perl and the Perl Cookbook are my go-to references.

The Monastery (http://www.perlmonks.org) is an excellent resource; lots of questions already answered, and lots of very helpful people.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks. The Monastery looks very promising.

[avram]

This doesn't answer your question, but if you're just learning to program, and you're using Perl, you'll almost certainly get a great deal of use out of O'Reilly's Perl Cookbook.

Also, you need to investigate backups and version control. If you're modifying your website on your own, you're gonna screw something up at some point, and you need a reliable way of flipping it back to the last good version.

(Now ten different programmers will follow up on this comment, each recommending a different version control system.)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I've got the CookBook, having been optimistic in the past about getting the round tuit about perl.

It's occurred to me that I'll need more than the one backup copy of the site mnemex set up. And some knowledge of version control, but both are a way down the road from here.

[mneme]

I've generally had at least three copies -- the copy on my usual shell account, a /stage copy on the main site, and the main site. I also typically use/used cvs for version control -- though that was before the rise of subversion, which is far better, and git, which is differently better.

[n5red.livejournal.com]

I can also recommend Ruby. It's a nice language to write code in and the Ruby community is full of really nice folks. http://ruby-lang.org/

AT last year's Ruby Conference, one of the presentations went from "Little Bunny Foo-Foo" to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. And it made sense.

[landley.livejournal.com]

> I'm not sure what language would be more sensible in general,
> though people seem to like Python.

Yup. Nice general purpose language, works well, a couple decades old now so it's widely deployed and has all the kinks worked out, and it doesn't produce the kind of crawling horrors Perl tends to spawn if you give it more than a dozen lines of code in any one place.

Rob