At 05:32 PM 6/13/2001, you wrote:
>I join this group, and I get discussions of regexes and XML, etc. I have
>no idea what a regex is! What books have you guys (who I assume are
>beginners too, since that's the name of this board) been reading? Turn
>me into a beginner too!
>
>Kirk
Despair not. You are a beginner. : )
All a regex is a regular expression, which, I hope to high-heaven, were
mentioned in Perl in 24 Hours. I would think that doing your file parsing
and such you would have had to have come across them. If you need to know
more about them, let us know.
As for all the XML stuff, I consider myself a passable Perl programmer, but
I spend a *very* little time in XML-land, so I would qualify myself as
sub-beginner as far as Perl with XML is concerned. I've been keeping up
with that thread because I know I'm going to need some of the tips
mentioned when I finally get around to some real XML stuff.
As for books, you should really pick up Programming Perl, 3rd Edition,
known throughout the community as the Camel Book, or just Camel. If it
pertains to Perl, it's in there. And, frankly, I would not have
recommended Perl in 24 Hours as anyone's first book. (As an aside, it was
the first book I picked up, but only because a good friend of mine had it,
was willing to lend it to me for a bit, and we were both not-so-blissfully
unaware of the great resources out there.) If you feel like you are shaky
on some of the basics you might want to check out the Llama Book, Learning
Perl, to get up to speed. But from your description of what you have
accomplished, I don't know if you'll need it. (BTW, when I returned 24
Hours to my friend, I lent him my Llama Book too, and he was really amazed
at how much clearer the explanations were, and how much more readable the
code was.)
Both of the books mentioned above are published by O'Reilly and
Associates. Look around for the O'Reilly books with the light blue
binding. There be Perl. And you'll figure out the animal nicknames when
you see the covers.
Later,
Sean.
