Re: Learning Perl - the Good and the Bad (Tutorials, Habits, and Tools, etc)

>>Hmmm... You seem to have a reading comprehension problem.
>>From the Preface:

We can't give you all of Perl in just a few hours. The books that
promise that are probably fibbing a bit. Instead, we've carefully
selected a complete and useful subset of Perl for you to learn, good
for programs from one to 128 lines long, which end up being about 90%
of the programs in use out there. And when you're ready to go on, we've
included a number of pointers for further education.

>>From "Beyond the Llama":

So as not to repeat ourselves in every paragraph: the important part of
what we don't cover here is covered in the Alpaca. Read the Alpaca,
especially if you'll be writing programs that are longer than 100 lines
(alone or with other people)

Seems pretty clear to me. <<

Paul -

In the same spirit: you seem to have an intellectual honesty problem.

Or: read what I wrote, not what you wish I'd written..

No programming book I'm aware of claims to cover ***all*** of a
language. The innocuous disclaimers you quote above would have been
honest and appropriate if Llama had merely negelected, say, advanced
regex construction or Perl OOP - just as similar prefaces are for C++
books that don't cover the more esoteric details of templates, or Lisp
books that tell you macro programming exists, but no more. This is
expected, reasonable, and therefore does no require any more than the
usual level "this book doesn't tell you everything" paragraph. For this
reason it is dishonest and worthless - like a sign on a car with
malfunctioning brakes that merely warns you that no car is perfectly
safe.

Well, Doh! Of course no book ever covers a major language completely.

But Llama is totally unique for a major language book in that it leaves
out at least one key feature without which you can't understand the
language properly - you can't even write a decent function to take a
dot product. This - especially in a book that assumes some programming
experience is completely unique for a major language book. ***It
therefore requires, from simple honesty, a different level of warning -
one stating that rather than having left out an advanced or
intermediate topic it has left out a basic and essential subject for
writing even as simple a function as a dotp competently.***

I don't believe that any programmer would expect this level of short
circuitedness from the warning you cite, Paul, anymore than they would
expect a C book that gave a similar warning to lack a treatment of
pointers.

As for the 128 line crap - well, even for writing programs this length
a halfway comptent programmer should know what a reference is. I needed
to before I'd gone over a fraction of this length.

Note: I'm not criticizing Llama for being incomplete - I'm criticizing
it for not clearly stating the (capitals for the rude and the brain
dead, Paul) UNUSUAL - UNIQUE AND DANGEROUS - LEVEL OF ITS
INCOMPLETENESS.

You seem to have a reading comprehension problem, Paul. I hope the
capitals help.

Or maybe you really do regard passing arrays to a function as an
advanced topic? They're not - both those Internet tutorials I mentioned
cover them at least well enough to give a beginner a fair view of the
language. So much for that "We can't give you all of Perl in just a few
hours" excuse - this is an utterly essential feature to understand that
can be covered in minutes.

PS Thank you for being pointlessly rude - otherwise I would have had to
spend time thinking of a way of phrasing the above so that you didn't
look like an idiot.

.

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