On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 11:18 AM, David Sommerseth <dazo at 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. > > <http://diveintopython.org/> > > 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 -- regards, natxo