Hey all, I'm a third year college student majoring in Computer Science. I'm going on a job interview that I'm well suited for, excepting one area: perl! I don't know a thing about it. If anyone has any resources that might be helpful which I can look over for a few hours tonight, that would be great. Just something to give the impression that I know what I'm talking about if/when it comes up in the interview. Thanks!

I think it would be best to just tell the interviewer you don't know Perl. Problem solved.

If you study it for four hours and try to fake it, it will be obvious.

First, nobody ever matches the profile for a job perfectly. Job interviewers know this. If your set of skills happens to be precisely the set of skills the employer wants, they will probably be suspicious. Don't lose confidence over your not knowing Perl.

Part of getting a new job (especially while you're still in college) is learning the tools the company specializes in. You will never get a new job and know every piece of technology they use, every language they use, every library they use; in addition, you'll most likely be maintaining a lot of legacy code which you'll have never seen in your life. Never expect to get hired as a programmer and then start writing software from scratch. It happens, but it's far more likely you'll have to work on software for which many thousands of lines of code have already been written.

Just be honest. Don't pretend to know more about Perl than you do. If they don't hire you, then that means you couldn't have done the job without knowing Perl--i.e., you aren't qualified. Don't sweat it. Move on. Perhaps learn Perl in your spare time. [smile]

If you get stumped with a question about perl, tell them the solution have in mind on how you would do it in a language that you know and would google for a perl solution.

It'll show that you're capable of finding a solution for yourself and will not heavily rely on your co-workers for doing the job for you.

Obviously, things done in perl will be a lot less lines of code than other languages (like c++, for example), but it's one of those things you'll learn during your research.

Good luck!