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Tinkering with Perl
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When you were younger -- perhaps even now -- you played or play with Legos, or some other similar building toy. When I was a boy, I played with Legos a lot, and I was very sad when my elaborate collection was destroyed.
Growing up means changing in some ways, but there are also ways in which an adult remains forever a child. It is a truly sad thing when the child inside of a grown-up dies; something important has gone out.
I am a grown-up now, and I still play with Legos. Only now, I play with them in a different form. Instead of using Legos that you can see, I use Legos that you can only see with your mind -- I have to use my imagination. I play with these Legos when I program.
When you are holding Legos in your hand, you have in your head an idea of what you want to build. And you start putting the little bricks together, piece by piece, until you have built the thing you've imagined in your head. One little brick is very small and very simple -- but there are ways to put them together, and if you put things together the right way, you can do some amazing things.
It is the same way with programming. This book will show you some of the little bricks we have, and then look at ways to put them together. It is my hope that you will begin to tinker -- see how you can put things together, see what works, what doesn't work. Then maybe you will imagine things, and see if you can build them out of these programming bricks.
There are many things to learn in programming, and this is only a beginning. But I hope that I may be able to help you begin to explore, and discover what it can be like to program.
Tinkering with Perl is a free book that provides an introduction to programming in Perl, as well as a basic reference for things like foreach in Perl, if-then, and if-then-else, in addition to providing a glossary where you can find definitions for concatenate and other terms.
Tinkering with Perl may be one of the most popular offerings on this site, but it's not the only attraction. You can read a tongue-in-cheek Game Review: Meatspace, read an even more offbeat customer service survey (whether or not you actually fill it out), and spend a few minutes wishing your boss would read, The Administrator Who Cried, "Important!" (Not to mention that there are other things you can read here besides tech stuff, from Janra Ball: The Headache to The Spectacles.)
Jonathan's Corner
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Tinkering with Perl
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