Re: [OT] Learning PERL
-- Kevin.Bewley@camr.org.uk <Kevin.Bewley@camr.org.uk> wrote
(on Friday, 31 January 2003, 02:17 PM +0000):
> Hi,
> I know this is slightly off-topic but it's definitely related to
> virtually all Un*xen I've ever come across. I have a colleague who has
> never used a *real* OS but now as part of his job he has to. A few times
> I've come across him doing things like find/replace over and over in nedit
> to change every occurrence of fred for wilma for example. I've quickly
> shown him how to PERL it on those occasions. He's finally starting to get
> it and has asked me if I know of a good book for learning PERL for a
> complete beginner - I let him borrow my Camel (Programming PERL to those
> who don't know) but it's too hard for him - no prior programming
> experience.
If he's using nedit, he should take a look at nedit's support for
regexps -- it's very good, and he wouldn't need to use perl to do tasks
like this that he's accustomed to doing in an editor.
> Can anyone recommend a book (or even better, and online tutorial set) for
> this guy to learn basic PERL from. You know simple reg-ex's and the like?
Best book to learn perl from is O'Reilly Press' "Learning Perl", and the
section of regular expressions in "Programming Perl" is incredible. If
he's mainly interested in learning regexps -- the basics of which can be
used in a variety of editors, sed, grep, perl, etc -- try "Mastering
Regular Expressions," also an O'Reilly title.
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
matthew@weierophinney.net
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