If you’ve read any of my first five Perl tutorials, you’ll know that Randal Schwartz graced the comments. For anyone familiar with Perl, you know that Randal is considered a god amongst Perl programmers, having worked with the language from its inception, and having written tons of books and articles about Perl, either in whole or in part, and doing tons of training. In fact, I learned Perl reading his books (and others).

Randal raised several good points in his comments to my Perl tutorials. However, I had an agenda regarding my approach so far. First things first. I haven’t taught Perl as much as Randal has, and only worked with about half the years (10 for me). But the people I have taught either were not programmers, or came from some other programming background. They were mostly corporate clients and felt rather overwhelmed by the cryptic nature of some Perl notation. (Cryptic to anyone who hasn’t programmed in it. I love its compact nature due to regular expressions.) So I had to take a different approach.

It’s the same approach I was taking here on this site: introduce Perl concepts slowly. First introduce functional scripts, then show how to do it more efficiently. At least until I built up enough traffic that your comments would finally tell me what you wanted to know. Then I could start introducing advanced Perl programming to solve real problems that blogmasters and webmasters would encounter. Then you’d see the way I really code in Perl.

Still, my Perl code will never be as efficient or compact as someone with the experience Randal has. And even more to the point, it’s tough finding Perl jobs up here in Canada. So I don’t work with it much anymore except for my own web analytics work. I’m a bit rusty, but wanted to capture what I knew before I forgot it all. (I suffer from a memory-loss condition and no longer have a “real job”, partly because of this.)

Maybe I got wrong. Maybe I should introduce advanced concepts right up front, and hope that you know enough Perl to follow along. Except that I’m not really aiming this site at my peers. Real Perl programmers, in my experience, learn the concepts very quickly and are unlikely to need any of these tutorials. So my intent was to write for anyone else that may want to use Perl and wanted a starting point. It was always my intent to recommend various Perl books, including Randal’s

Anyone care to comment about my approach?