Learn Perl

S – specific
– Is this goal specific? Not as it is. Let me restate this goal to mean that I wish to finish the book (and all related exercises) ‘Learning Perl’ and this goal will be satisfied.

M – measurable
– Is this goal measurable? Yes.

A – attainable
– Is this goal attainable? Yes.

R – realistic
– Is this goal realistic? Yes.

T – timeline
– What is the timeline for finishing this goal? Let’s say I want this goal to be done within two months.

I read only 15 minutes today. I ended up staying about 5 hours late at work, so I don’t really have energy to work on Perl. I finished chapter 5, and I’m at the exercises section, so tomorrow I’ll be working on doing practice programs. I really love coding itself, so I expect this will help me renew my enthusiasm.

I expect I’ll have to work on it for more than half an hour tomorrow, though.

I did my half hour for today. I am working on Chapter 5 in Learning Perl. I got through pages 68-82.

Topics covered include:

input from standard input (STDIN)
input from the diamond operator (I thought the story about how this was named was cute)
invocation arguments (@ARGV)
output to standard output
formatted output with printf (%s, %g, %d, etc)
arrays and printf
filehandles
opening filehandles (OPEN)
bad filehandles
closing filehandles (CLOSE)

I’ve been slacking on my progress on here, so I think I’m going to set myself to work on this half an hour per day, starting tonight.

I have worked my way through the first four chapters in “Learning Perl” and completed all the exercises. I’m having a lot of fun working on the programs—I really do enjoy coding.

I have some specific tools in mind that I need to code for my work, so I’m evaluating the material through the viewpoint of getting those tools made, and I can already see that Perl will be very useful.

I am so excited! My Perl books arrived!

I now have Learning Perl and Programming Perl.

These are a gift from my ex-boyfriend. That feels kinda weird, but I am grateful :)