Programming/Scripting Resource

[John Van Ostrand]

First off, I'm not a heads down programmer, I'm a system consultant who
writes small utility programs to achieve my goals and I often work a bit
in small web sites, but this may describe where you want to be.

> 1) What language should I look at learning/relearning?  I'm thinking
> Perl, since I've done some before, though it's been a while

It really depends on what you want to do. I find perl to be really good
for system admin utilities and text file parsing. It's embedded pattern
matching makes parsing text files and streams really easy. I may start
out in a bash script and change to perl once I realize I need to do
more. There are perl modules for everything so it's easy to do just
about anything. There are GUI extensions for perl but...

Red Hat, Fedora Core and CentOS all use Python for gui and curses admin
tools. This may be where you want to go if you want to get fancy for
admin.

For web you might look at PHP (it's heavily used) or Java if you want to
program serious web services. Ruby on rails has gained a lot of
popularity lately for it's AJAX libraries.

I've really just stuck with PHP.

> 2) Does anyone know a good resource for n00bs to teach themselves?

I don't look for tutorials any more, but you can find references at
www.cpan.org for perl, www.php.net for PHP, and java.sun.com for Java. 

If you are going to get into web you'll need references to HTML, HTTP
and Javascript too.

-- 
John Van Ostrand                       Net Direct Inc.
CTO, co-CEO                   564 Weber St. N. Unit 12
                                  Waterloo, ON N2L 5C6
john-Da48MpWaEp0CzWx7n4ubxQ at public.gmane.org                     ph: 518-883-1172 x5102
Linux Solutions / IBM Hardware        fx: 519-883-8533

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