🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <m24stplgfz.fsf@mailhost.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de>,
David Kastrup  <dak@mailhost.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:

>Actually, I have just looked at the documentation coming with Perl.
>While containing sort of an introduction to Perl, a reference of
>available functions and a reasonably complete syntax seems to be
>absent.
>
>Correct me if I'm wrong, I'd certainly would like to learn Perl as it
>is an often used language.  I'd certainly like to know if there is an
>answer to my requirements short of buying some book.  If there isn't,
>it seems that RMS was not so wrong about the status of good, free
>documentation still being needed for Perl.

There doesn't seem to be a comprehensive tutorial for Perl (or I haven't
looked in the right places, which is quite possible), but the man pages
are really complete and quite readable.  They're just reference guides,
and good ones at that, which doesn't make them very friendly as learning
tools.

Still, if you're already familiar with programming, it's quite possible
to learn Perl from reading the manpages (you'll see which practice which
bits to skip... ("man perlguts" sounds like a good candidate for
skipping on a first reading!)).  And there's lots of freely available
Perl code (in CPAN; see www.perl.org) that you can look at, to get a
feel of how things are done.

I learned Perl that way (manpages + example programs), but that was
before perl 5, and the language was a lot smaller and simpler (but not
as powerful) back then.  There's a simple perl4 tutorial that I wrote on
my hacks webpage (http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/espel/hacks.html),
but it's more geared at the absolute programming beginner, and it
doesn't touch perl 5.

-- 
Roger Espel Llima, espel@llaic.u-clermont1.fr
http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/espel/index.html