I live in the Northern VA/DC metro region, and I am an Oracle DBA
looking to pick up on Perl scripting. I was wondering if anyone could
recommend a learning center (i.e. Learning Tree). Also, would be better
suited for Unix Shell Scripting as opposed to Perl? Thanks in advance!
I suspect that most people learn Perl through a combination of reading
books and using on-line materials like various articles and other people's
sources. There is a book about using Perl for system administration, for
example.
The nice thing about existing code is that it meets your immediate needs,
as well as being educational.
Not having done much shell scripting, I think the main advantages of Perl
for that purpose are: (1) better data structures and (2) a better
framework. For example, if you start making complex scripts, you can use
OOP in Perl. You can also leverage the vast mountain of code modules
already written for Perl. For example, you could access your Oracle
databases using Perl. Perl is also considered "a natural" by many people
when it comes to manipulating data, especially text data. Many people use
Perl as "glue" between otherwise unconnected processes. (XML is supposed
to fill that role in many instances).
-Alan
