Programming/Scripting Resource

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Wed, 10 Jan 2007, Matt wrote:

> **WARNING-n00b ALERT**
> I've been dabbling in Linux over the last few years, and lately it has
> become apparent that my lack of programming/scripting knowledge is going
> to be a problem sooner or later, especially after Leah's excellent
> session on LDAP last night.  However, I suck at debugging - I can handle
> tracking down silly mistakes like missing semicolons and the like, but
> when it comes to hardcore debugging, I'm usually up the proverbial
> creek.
>
> So, I have two questions:
> 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
> 2) Does anyone know a good resource for n00bs to teach themselves?

     Everything begins with the shell.

     The commands you type at the prompt are the same ones you use in a
     script -- and vice versa. For the vast majority of programs, the
     shell is more than adequate.

     I use C when I need more speed (which is surpisingly rarely, these
     days), and I have learned enough lisp to write emacs functions.

     I tried perl and python, but perl is unreadable, and, I found both
     far more unwieldy than the shell.

-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                <http://cfaj.freeshell.org/shell>
    ===================================================================
    Author:
    Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
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