On Sun, 21 Sep 2003, Paul Kraus wrote: > Perl was pretty much my first language. Not counting Business Basic and same > old Pascal from high school. The more I learn the more I see that perl can > handle just about anything I want to do. How do you go about deciding if you > should use another tool such as C++ over perl? I am thinking about learning > another language and trying to decide what language would be best to learn. > To expand my skill set. Suggestions, Ideas, Book Recommendations? >
I would suggest learning several things: 1. C is a good language to know as it is very close to machine language and gives you important insights about programming and computers architecture. I can't really recommend a book because I first learned it from the Turbo C++ 3.0 manual, but I heard K&R's or "A Book on C" are good. 2. The book "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" is very interesting and enlightening. It is available online here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ It teaches programming through Scheme, a dialect of LISP that is very similar to Perl. I fully understood closures after reading this book. I also suggest doing some of the exercises in the book, because they give a whole new dimension to learning it. 3. After you tackled Scheme and lexical scoping, then Lambda Calculus is an extra useful enlightenment. It's a very minimalistic language that is actually quite usable. I learned LC from a book I found about it in the library, but I wrote a lecture about it with detailed slides: http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/lecture/Lambda-Calculus/ 4. I found learning Haskell to be quite enlightening and I still like to experiment with it on occasions. I learned it from the so-called "Gentle Introduction to Haskell": http://www.haskell.org/tutorial/ O'Caml is a similar language that is more usable, but less elegant. 5. Matlab is a very nice tool for making engineering calculations. If you deal with these kind of things, it is useful to know. Perl has an equivalent toolkit in PDL - the Perl data language. 6. Paul Graham's "On Lisp" book is also very nice. http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html Available for free download online. --------------- Regards, Shlomi Fish > > > Paul Kraus > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ An apple a day will keep a doctor away. Two apples a day will keep two doctors away. Falk Fish -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
