BEST PERL BOOK FOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION UNIX

[John Bokma]

I do lots of perl programming and I have done lots of writing in C/C++
and C#, buts that's the silliest argument I've heard so far.

Clueless. Technically it's possible to run (a subset of) Perl on .NET.

 

[John W. Kennedy]

[email protected]:



Sure, what other metric is common to programs that's easily measured?

It's bad, but it's the best they've got. I had probably 1000 LOC in a
recent class project and probably wrote only 100 myself. Everything else
was done by a GUI builder or by the UML tool I used. (It was Java, not
Perl, but I constantly wished it was Perl. Does that count as on topic
here? ;-))

I seem to recall that, back in the 60s or 70s, someone did a study and
discovered that LOCs actually was a pretty decent metric, even
cross-language. From one language to another, one LOC seemed to take up
about the same average amount of planning, debugging, etc.

 

[Tad McClellan]

Subject: BEST PERL BOOK FOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION UNIX

[snip]
Any of the tutorials mentioned in the Perl FAQ.

perldoc -q book

Also, today I went around by my town and I also enterd the bookstore
which probably has the biggest CS section here. I gave a quick look at
the Perl books, and I noticed a "Minimal Perl" one which should be
aimed precisely at UNIX/Linux sysadmins. I can't comment on the book
proper, but the latter has a foreword by ("that") Conway, and I don't
believe in the principle of authority in general, but a priori that's
a sort of guarantee...

Tim Maher is the Real Deal, so I expect that his is a fine book too,
though I have not read it.

 

[Ted Zlatanov]

[email protected]:



Sure, what other metric is common to programs that's easily
measured?

Function points, man-hours and money spent, number of curse words in
the comments, weight of documentation...

It's bad, but it's the best they've got. I had probably 1000 LOC in a
recent class project and probably wrote only 100 myself. Everything else
was done by a GUI builder or by the UML tool I used. (It was Java, not
Perl, but I constantly wished it was Perl. Does that count as on topic
here? ;-))

Note that such automatically generated code will still have to exist
within your application, and some day it will throw a mysterious
error you'll have to debug. So it's definitely a part of your LOC
count.

Ted

 

[Ted Zlatanov]

I seem to recall that, back in the 60s or 70s, someone did a study and
discovered that LOCs actually was a pretty decent metric, even
cross-language. From one language to another, one LOC seemed to take
up about the same average amount of planning, debugging, etc.

Scripting languages like Perl, Python, etc. definitely break this
rule. I'd say the ratio is 5-20 LOC in C to 1 LOC in Perl, depending
on the skill of the programmer and the actual application.

The "lines of comments" count, however, is about 3 to 1 for proper
documentation IMO.

Ted