On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 11:18 AM, David Sommerseth dazo@users.sourceforge.net wrote:
On 13/12/10 17:32, Lamar Owen wrote:
On Monday, December 13, 2010 11:14:24 am Sven Aluoor wrote:
What programming language should I learn?
Python. You can find useful examples of python code throughout CentOS, beginning the yum itself. Get yourself a copy of 'Dive into Python' (can be had as a free download, legalling) and, well, dive into python!
I completely agree! Python is really worth looking at. And a lot of the tools on RHEL/CentOS are written in Python.
I see quite some people suggest Perl. I've been in that camp as well, but I personally find Python much more intuitive than Perl, and also a lot more consistent. Perl is truly like paint, you can splash the colours around just like you want. The learning curve for Perl is quite higher than Python in my experience.
Did you learn Perl first? Then learning something else on top of that is easier. Programming languages share lots of concepts.
"Dive into Python" helped me to really get started, and it went fast with this book.
Modern Perl: http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/ is also free to download as a pdf file. Great book to get started.
Python enforces you to be more consistent, which is not a bad thing if you want to understand better what you are doing in the very beginning. Later on Perl, Ruby, C#, Java, C/C++ might be a good alternatives, as they probably are much stronger in a lot of fields for more complex tasks.
use strict; use warnings;
if you write Perl and do not use that, you will have problems, yes.
But remember each tool has its own use case. You don't need a hammer when you have screws. It's the same with programming languages. And Python and Perl are often used as the "Swiss Army Knife". Useful for a lot of ad-hoc and not too heavy routine tasks, but you won't rely on it when going hunting in the wilderness.
well, Perl helps me daily on the wilderness of my job. I do not understand the analogy, but it probably is my fault ;-)
kind regards,
David Sommerseth