I attended an introductory Perl course recently. I’ve always wanted to learn the language. It is a very powerful scripting tool with excellent regular expression support.
The training delivered by Daina Pettit from LearningTree was excellent. One nugget I got out of the class, that I think is worth half of the class cost, is this:
On command line, be it *nix or ActiveState on Windows, type:
perl -de 0
to open Perl debugger interactively. Perl will try to run any statement you type. It is a great way to learn.
-d launches the debugger. -e takes one line of program. When given 0, it will take whatever we type through the prompt.
Fellow SqlServerCentral author K. Brian Kelley wrote an excellent article on using Perl and Windows::ODBC module to manage Sql Server here. Brian is apparently a big fan of Perl.
4 responses to “Learn Perl through Perl debugger”
Yes, I am. 🙂 I can often do things in Perl in significantly less time than other languages and I can write cross-platform at the same time. Can’t beat that.
I am a beginner and looking forward to learn more and use more Perl in my work. But I haven’t really played much with it lately. Tons of work, especially in summer…
Have you grabbed Linchi Shea’s book from aPress yet?
Yup!
In fact, I got it a few months ago, but just started going through it. I’ve downloaded the code and went over some examples, but got some problems. Guess debugging that will be a good way to learn.
I am not reading it from beginning to end. I got the basic idea, so I am picking at the sample code I am interested in and testing them out. I think that will be my approach to learn.