Late Night PC

Learning Perl the Hard Way was a good read. Only took me a few hours and I feel like I have a good introduction to the language. As usual, I worked through the first few examples but rushed at the end. Allen Downey does some really fun stuff: Huffman coding and Markov Chains in short programs that show off the power of Perl. My favourite thing about the text though was that I got to skip all the redundant crap like explaining what a variable is. Learning Perl the Hard Way is aimed squarely at people who are already familiar with other programming languages. If you code in C then you'll be comfortable with this book.

Perl has a frightening number of odd language constructs. Every language has oddities but I guess I don't see the reason for all of Perl's yet. It's one of those languages that I've always meant to play with but never felt quite that compelled. This time I think most of it stuck. Now next time I feel like grabbing the WoW Armory module to mess around with I've got one more reason to go for it.