Status Updates From Programming Perl

Will definitely have to come back to the debugger chapter if I'm ever writing Perl programs that complex. The CPAN chapter provided some nice history and overview of how things work. Onto Perl as Culture! The security chapter is great. I wish more programming books had chapters like this.

Skimmed chapters 14 and 15 - they don't apply to me now. Onto part 3 - Perl as technology. This is fascinating, even if I'm skimming because it's way lower-level than I need at the moment.

Just about done with OOP chapter. *MY* takeaway - just don't do OOP with Perl. It seems like it's not meant for it and was bolted on. (At least as of v5.14 when the book was written). If you need OOP with scripting/interpreted language - Python and Ruby seem a better bet.

It feels like Perldoc in book format.

Package on its own was a bit abstract. I didn't get the point. Once I read about modules it made more sense. I'm surprised (with how detailed this book is) that the module section wasn't larger. But I guess it just falls out from everything else covered so far. Or may is better covered in the Learning Perl trilogy.

There was a lot of really interesting stuff in the refrences chapter, but it's way above the programmign I'm currently doing in Perl. Data Structures was neat - basically in Perl everything else is implemented via arrays and hashes. Packages - so far it's been a bit too abstract for me.

Finally came across some stuff that would have helped me yesterday with dereferencing from within subroutines.

Done with subroutines and onto reference. A lot of the later stuff went over my head. will have to refer back to this if I ever come across a real Perl-head's code

Finally at subroutines

After 10 more pages of regex left.....

regexes are complex, who knew?

Continue to move through the regex chapter. Mostly very interesting. Did skim over some parts, but I've got 1-2 books just on regexes that I'll probably tackle at some point.

regex is fascinating and I'm using it a lot as I go through the 2015 Advent of Code problem set

Woohoo! Onto chapter 5 and pattern matching. And not a moment too soon as I'm working through the 2015 Advent of Code problems and have used quite a bit of regex.

Continuing with operators. This is almost more of the "Textbook" version of Perl - how it all functions compared to Learning Perl which is more about getting started programming in Perl.

Onto operators!

Part 1 was awesome. As someone who read the Learning Perl book 10 years ago and hasn't touched it much since, but who does amateur programming - it was just what I needed to jumpstart getting back into Perl. Now, onto part 2! Also, I love the humor of this book.

Coming back to Perl after having done a bunch of Python and some Ruby is making me have a deeper appreciation for the way Perl is written. But they all also feel like cousins. It's so interesting thinking of how they are so similar and yet so different.