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Getting Started With Perl

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6 comments, last by Peon 19 years, 11 months ago
Boooo, just got off the phone with Yahoo! They called me about an internship I applied for. I was looking for something non-technical, but I got a call about a position writing Perl spiders for cataloguing webpages. So I decided I MUST learn Perl now, over the summer, so that next summer I will be prepared. At $3250 / mo for a college freshman with no real work experience, plus the added experience and coolness of working at Yahoo, I am quite disappointed Anyway, I''d like to get started soon. I can find tutorials on my own, but I am interested in either a free webhost or a server I can host myself that is easy to set up so that I can test my perl scripts (or if there is a program that "emulates" the process, that is also find) Any help along these avenues would help me a lot Thanks.
Peon
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You don''t need a webhost or anything like that to get started with perl. Just go to perl.com, grab the latest executable for your platform and go play. Contrary to popular belief perl is a useful language for things other than running CGI.
Interesting, I haven''t had much contact with Perl; didn''t really know that. Would I be able to write Perl ''spiders'' (as I would have been doing at Yahoo) using this, or would I need some sort of host for that, since it needs to access webpages? In any any event, the site you suggested will help me get the syntax and style down. Thanks a lot.
Peon
$3250/mo? USD? WTF, I can h4><0r Perl, how come I can''t find an offer like that around here

Anyway. You can test the code on your HD by referencing local HTML files, until you''re ready to go live. It''s worthwhile looking around for a webhost that will let you do CGI scripting, though, to get the full experience of playing around.

For CGI help, the best resource I know of is www.bignosebird.com.
Writing a spider as CGI/webpage would be pretty silly and/or pointless. A spider written in perl would probably be executed outside of any webserver process. Perl by itself has access to all the things you''d need to write a spider: clean socket access, including quite a few wrappers for grabbing entire webpages at a time; good string/regex processing and relatively painless database access methods.
quote:Original post by Zahlman
$3250/mo? USD? WTF, I can h4><0r Perl, how come I can''t find an offer like that around here

Anyway. You can test the code on your HD by referencing local HTML files, until you''re ready to go live. It''s worthwhile looking around for a webhost that will let you do CGI scripting, though, to get the full experience of playing around.

For CGI help, the best resource I know of is www.bignosebird.com.
USD yes, California is expensive so they pay well. A lot of that is necessary for living expenses, though I would be living at home in the summer so that would not be an issue.

Thanks for excusing my ignorance SiCrane I wasn''t aware either that Perl had socket capabilities and things like that. It''s a lot more powerful than I gave it credit for, apparently. Thanks a lot for your advice (again)

Peon
Perl can be run off the command line. All it really needs is an interpreter. A lot of people think it''s only for the web, but it''s usefullness includes MUCH more than just CGI scripts (of course on Windows, its system administration functions are not as cool as they would be on UNIX variants). In fact, Perl can do just about everything (except be easily read :-)

The other bit of advice is that once you got scripts for the web running, you do NOT need a remote host (same goes for PHP) for testing. You can set up Apache webserver on your own desktop and play with your scripts "live" without uploading anything since it''s all on your HD.

Try PHPTriad. It sets up PHP, MySQL, and Apache in just a few clicks. Perl you can install seperate from ActiveState Perl (Windows, i assume).

Get the "Camel" book, its one of the coolest books about programming. I think a lot (or most) of it is available online or as man-pages, but if you need it for a job I think its worth the money.

Link here
---------"It''s always useful when you face an enemy prepared to die for his country. That means both of you have exactly the same aim in mind." -Terry Pratchett

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