Duffbert's Random Musings

1 - Hooray! Another convert! I hope you're using "Learning Perl" (at least third or fourth edition).

2 - Unfortunately (from your perspective), I'm using Beginning Perl from Apress. My review copy of Learning Perl (reviewed back in August) got snarfed up by someone. But after getting the basics down here, I plan on doing a review of the Camel book, as well as getting another copy of Learning Perl to reinforce what I covered here...

3 - Ruby is getting to be the "hot" new language. I can't give you specific details as to why yet, but from what I've heard it's far easier than Java without all the overhead.

Perl is a classic language that has been termed the "duct tape of the internet". It's designed to do text manipulation far better and faster (in terms of programming) than other tools. Tools like Perl can easily be used to parse and hack text files to get desired results in just a few lines.

Or so they tell me... :)

4 - Ok, Tom, if your not embarrased to show your "Hello World" code, I'd like to ask a simple question.
Why would I want to learn Perl or Ruby? Are these languages becoming popular?

5 - Hey Tom!

Congrats on learning a new skill! Way to go! Feels good to stretch that greymatter, eh?

You should check out Ruby as well. Im loving it. The same program in Ruby?

puts 'Hello, World!'

That simple. I've been writing about it and you can find a few links here:
http://www.datatribesoftwerks.com/members/datatribe/DatatribeBlog.nsf/archive/20051219-749864

6 - I have Ruby on my "to do" list for 2006. Probably after Lotusphere...