Brian D. Foy - Mastering Perl

This book isnt going to make you a Perl master; you have to do that for yourself by programming a lot of Perl, trying a lot of new things, and making a lot of mistakes. Im going to help you get on the right path, but the road to mastery is one of self-reliance and independence. As a Perl master, youll be able to answer your own questions as well as those of others.

In the golden age of guilds, craftsmen followed a certain path, both literally and figuratively, as they mastered their craft. They started as apprentices and would do the boring bits of work until they had enough skill to become the more trusted journeyman. The journeyman had greater responsibility but still worked under a recognized master. When they had learned enough of the craft, the journeymen would produce a master work to prove their skill. If other masters deemed it adequately masterful, the journeyman became a recognized master himself.

The journeymen and masters also traveled (although people dispute if thats where the journey part of the name came from) to other masters, where they would learn new techniques and skills. Each master knew things the others didnt, perhaps deliberately guarding secret methods or doing it in a different way. Part of the journeymens education was learning from more than one master.

Interactions with other masters and journeymen continued the masters education. He learned from those masters with more experience, and learned from himself as he taught journeymen, who also taught him as they brought skills they learned from other masters. A master never stops learning.

The path an apprentice followed affected what he learned. An apprentice who studied with more masters was exposed to many more perspectives and ways of teaching, all of which he could roll into his own way of doing things. Odd things from one master could be exposed, updated, or refined by another, giving the apprentice a balanced view on things. Additionally, although the apprentice might be studying to be a carpenter or a mason, different masters applied those skills to different goals, giving the apprentice a chance to learn different applications and ways of doing things.

Unfortunately, programmers dont operate under the guild system. Most Perl programmers learn Perl on their own (Im sad to say, as a Perl instructor), program on their own, and never get the advantage of a mentor. Thats how I started. I bought the first edition of Learning Perl and worked through it on my own. I was the only person I knew who had even heard of Perl, although Id seen it around a couple of times. Most people used what others had left behind. Soon after that, I discovered comp.lang.perl.misc and started answering any question that I could. It was like self-assigned homework. My skills improved and I got almost instantaneous feedback, good and bad, and I learned even more Perl. I ended up with a job that allowed me to program Perl all day, but I was the only person in the company doing that. I kept up my homework on comp.lang.perl.misc .

I eventually caught the eye of Randal Schwartz, who took me under his wing and started my Perl apprenticeship. He invited me to become a Perl instructor with Stonehenge Consulting Services, and then my real Perl education began. Teaching, meaning figuring out what you know and how to explain it to others, is the best way to learn a subject. After a while of doing that, I started writing about Perl, which is close to teaching, although with correct grammar (mostly) and an editor to correct mistakes.

That presents a problem for Mastering Perl, which I designed to be the third book of a trilogy starting with Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl, both of which Ive had a hand in. Each of those are about 300 pages, and thats what Im limited to here. How do I encapsulate the years of my experience in such a slim book?

In short, I cant. Ill teach you what I think you should know, but youll also have to learn from other sources. As with the old masters, you cant just listen to one person. You need to find other masters too, and thats also the great thing about Perl: you can do things in so many different ways. Some of these masters have written very good books, from this publisher and others, so Im not going to duplicate those topics here, as I discuss in a moment.