The WELL: inkwell.vue.34: Laura Lemay: Brain the size of a small planet!

#128: Fuzzy Logic (phred) Sun 25 Jul 99 19:17

Sun, 25 Jul 1999 19:17:00 PDT

Long time since the last activity here, but I just wanted to note I did finally buy the book and found it quite good. (Of course you already knew that!) And I paid special attention to the two regex chapters and learned some new things and got a lot clearer on some others.

I'm going to the O'Reilly Perl & everything conference(s) next month (they have tracks also on Apache, Python, Tcl, Sendmail and "Open Source Business"), so when I get done with that maybe I finally will be able to call myself a Real Perl Programmer.

And to think it all started one day in 1991 when I was doing some work at the Well office, and dhawk looked over his glasses with his feet up on the table as he was merrily scrolling along, and said, "yes, you can do that in awk but you really should be using Perl." [Read entire topic]

#127: Reva Basch (reva) Sat 1 May 99 13:34

Sat, 01 May 1999 13:34:00 PDT

Thanks for the pointer. Looks like the story you're talking about is at http://www.scientificamerican.com/1999/0599issue/0599bosak.html [Read entire topic]

#126: hoofprints d' (satyr) Fri 30 Apr 99 18:42

Fri, 30 Apr 1999 18:42:00 PDT

Anyone seen the current issue of Scientific American? There's supposed to be an article in it that explains SGML, HTML, and XML in easy-to-understand terms. [Read entire topic]

#125: (jeffk) O o . o O (jeffk) Fri 16 Apr 99 09:45

Fri, 16 Apr 1999 09:45:00 PDT

I generally only use it when I'm trying to figure out a regular expression. [Read entire topic]

#124: Rafe Colburn (rafeco) Thu 15 Apr 99 18:22

Thu, 15 Apr 1999 18:22:00 PDT

I have the reference of functions highlighted, and a post it note where the file test switches are listed. [Read entire topic]

#123: Fuzzy Logic (phred) Thu 15 Apr 99 18:02

Thu, 15 Apr 1999 18:02:00 PDT

Both my copies of the Camel book have post-it notes at specific spots. I bet those of you who use them can guess pretty much where they are (just one or two for each book). [Read entire topic]

#122: Rafe Colburn (rafeco) Thu 15 Apr 99 07:31

Thu, 15 Apr 1999 07:31:00 PDT

I eventually took my copy of Programming Perl, held the important sections together, and colored little tabs on the sides of the pages so that I can look at the book and know what I should open it up to. It is also well bookmarked.

(By the way, I'm jumping in here late, but I'd just like to say that Laura's book is wonderful. I'm a very experienced Perl programmer, but I learned all sorts of things in the course of reading the book. Disclaimer: I was one of the tech editors of the book.) [Read entire topic]

#121: Fuzzy Logic (phred) Wed 14 Apr 99 14:28

Wed, 14 Apr 1999 14:28:00 PDT

The regex thing is so right. You start with a few backreferences and pretty soon you're staring at issues having to do with whether the system is NP-complete :)

(Answer: it is.)

I think your view of the O'Reilly books is quite right, Laura. I'm not really a programmer so some of it (particularly the references and object-oriented stuff) just goes past me, but I had done a little bit of BASIC programming and hung around C programmers for a long time, so I found both Camel books to be invaluable, and I still refer to the first edition from time to time, tattered and torn as it may be (actually, it looks like a well-used phone book).

I never bought Learning Perl though I have skimmed through it at the store a couple times. The Dummies books are just, um, too dumb, I tried learning Tcl from the Dummies book and gave up in exasperation (not to mention the fact that it was full of typos, bad code fragments and every other editorial sin).

In Larry Wall's notion of the ever-growing onion, the tools that work for the inner layers of the onion (man pages for Tru Wizards, online help and newsgroups for geeks, O'Reilly books for all of them and normal got-work-to-do folks like me) aren't necessarily going to work well as the onion expands. There are a ton of people out there doing things with Visual Basic and Excel macros and all kinds of goop who need Perl, so I hope your book will be a good entree for them. [Read entire topic]

#120: Lenny Bailes (jroe) Wed 14 Apr 99 01:09

Wed, 14 Apr 1999 01:09:00 PDT

On the other hand, you can take your time about it, do a thorough treatment of the subject and get the publisher mad at you because the ship date slips.... (I'll tell you next year, whether this approach ever results in another book contract.) [Read entire topic]

#119: dragging in Hyperborea (dbdoty) Tue 13 Apr 99 22:05

Tue, 13 Apr 1999 22:05:00 PDT

Well, that's an element. It's mostly "the clock starts ticking when they ship you the beta version of the software" so you never have time to use the actual shipping version in a real work situation because the book is supposed to be on store shelves when the software ships. Most application software books are written this way--they're called "day and date" books in the trade. [Read entire topic]