FWIW, Perl was my first language. My timing sucked -- I learned Perl just a few years ago, right before the anti-Perl fad hit its fever pitch.

Everybody thinks it's cool to bash on Perl and PHP, right. I wouldn't call myself a seasoned enough dev to have an informed opinion, but I will say that that Learning Perl book from O'Reilly is one of the best-written language learning books I've read, and that teaching myself Perl gave me an advantage in my tech career.

It's not that I got to use it very often (I learned Perl before breaking into the tech industry as a very green sysadmin/software support engineer), but in picking up languages after the fact, I've never met a book as well-written. The exercises, in particular, are well-thought-out and pertinent to the material presented. Information that somebody savvy with the computer science *probably* knows but maybe not, is included. No extra knowledge is required to complete the exercises. Contrast that with the Programming in Lua book. Although it's a good reference book, and I still refer to it sometimes, the exercises seem to require a working knowledge of several higher mathematical concepts, and the actual content of the book refers to formal computer science concepts by name as part of explaining how to use the language. Don't get me wrong, I *love* stuff like that -- how else is a high-school-dropout autodidact gonna get seasoned with the theory? But for the purpose of showing somebody how to code and how to use a language, it's not a good fit. If Programming in Lua had been my first, I would have gotten stuck.

As it turned out, I was able to quickly pick up the subsequent languages I actually ended up using day-to-day by virtue of my experience with Perl. If somebody offered me a job writing Perl all day I'd happily take it.

Though, my pipe dream is to end up writing DSP and DAW software in C++. But I mean, aside from career wrangling, Perl's fine. I'm glad I have that perspective. I've also decided PHP is my next language, just cuz I have a bunch of new webdev friends that ask me questions about it. Every language sucks in some way. I'm over it.

You know, not to tangent off (oh wait this is slashdot) but this reminds me of a little soapbox I go on a lot lately:

I dropped out of high school and taught myself how to use Linux, which taught me computing because I'm a reasonably clever human who finds things interesting and the command line is a layer of abstraction closer to the computing than a Windows UI.

As I got some chops up from playing around with making websites for my guitar lessons and running various other services for my little LEGO camp business, I thought I should break into doing this stuff for a living. It sure paid better than what I was doing. But I was intimidated to the point of shaking as I looked at the job postings.

This was two years ago. I'm NO hot-shot (I've met them. They're incredible. I'm still a few years away), but two years into my career, I'm about as appalled as I was intimidated. I've worked places where I was the only one who knew how to use SSH keys. I'm still in the Support phase of my career and I routinely work with "Senior IT Architect Engineer High-Salary Genius" titled people who can't cd to /var/tmp in a Linux-dominated environment they're responsible for. They use the UI on every vendor-provided tool and I encountered one who had Gnome running on their servers!

We're talking hour-long conference calls just to get 'em to tar up the logs so I can run grep on them and tell them what's wrong. And these cats probably make twice as much as I do. (I'm only assuming, it's not like I ask 'em. It's just the titles in their email sig I'm going on here.)

It really reassures me about the next phase of my career. I will have to go back to school to get into the deep levels of software development I want to get into (I know enough to know what I don't. You just have to have that math and algorithms and other background. I'm talking low-level C), but there are plenty of well-paying gigs for me to save up with.

I had a really screwed up, rough start to life, but I made it into the industry and it's gonna be a great ride from here... Those clowns have taught me I'll have no problem. I mean, there's no guarantee I'll never be that engineer that has to have something basic explained to him, but I love computing almost as much as I love playing music, and I seem to know more than many of my colleagues in some areas. I'm lucky right now, I work in a place where I have access to lots of people who know more than I do.

Anyway yeah there's a lot of IT people who don't know what SNMP is.