SiliconJesus's Journal: New Job and Learning Perl

Started the new job this past Monday. Its been pretty slow thus far, with the exception of setting up my workstation (SunBlade 1000 - pretty sweet). I'm now faced with the fact that my perl skills have been very lacking for the past couple of years and I have put off learning it for too long. The new place does ALL of its development in perl. Luckily - I'm with two other guys that I've worked with before, and one of them (unbeknownst to me) was a perl programmer for Origin Games for three years before he came to the hosting company I used to work at - so he's getting me up to speed as fast as he can.

My first program's a bitch, only because I have to do date calculations and basically start off by finding 'yesterday' for a cron job that runs at 12:01 am. Its not as easy as it would sound, and I'm trying tricks that I used to be able to do in C, but since perl doesn't prototype its variables, they keep switching on me from one type 'date' to anotother 'int' which screws up my operator overloading. I'm sure there's an easy way to do what I'm doing, but I can't figgure it out, so I'm going to Borders tonight and buying all the Perl books that look even vaguely useful (then returning the useless ones on Sunday).

Overall - the new job is interesting and its exactly where I want to be. The Unix team (I'm part of) wields a surprising amount of power over the development process, partially creating some of the tools that glue the applications together. I'm looking forward to being able to expand my impact here in the near future.

So far, I have a couple small projects, the perl script I have to add functionality to, as well as evaluating a temperature / humidity meter for the server room (it used to be an office, so it has heating / AC / power / network / you name it issues), evaluating an upgrade of cfengine and also looking to upgrade the big brother server or replace it with nagios.

Lots of interesting work to be done - so little time.

perl -MCPAN -e shell

[the_mad_poster]

My first program's a bitch, only because I have to do date calculations and basically start off by finding 'yesterday' for a cron job that runs at 12:01 am

Date::Calc module. It's not light, it's not efficient, it's not pretty. But damn it! It works, and it's a lot easier than rolling your own code!

Re:perl -MCPAN -e shell

[nizo]

Yep cpan is your friend. Even if you can't install a module you can probably at least find the tasty bits(tm) in some code that do what you want to do.

Oh and by the way, you will probably end up writing something that is 90 lines long that next week you can write in 3 lines, so just get used to it now :-)

Re:perl -MCPAN -e shell

[EwokNinja]

Perl is power.

Date::Calc is good
Class::Date I've done a lot of work with and it's good too.

gl

[OctaneZ]

gl, when in doubt about why it crapped out, check semicolons, quotes, and brackets/parens.

here's hoping you find inner-camel.

haha

[OctaneZ]

good to see others have discovered the beauty of +1 underrated in friends journals...
the truly amusing scenario is when you get to moderate in your own journal.. one would think that would be disallowed.

Yesterday

[merlyn]

my @info = localtime (time - 86400);

(perldoc -tf localtime for the description of the list returned)