The Shrine

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>Ok, serious question here-- how hard would it be for me to learn enough about CGI / Perl to be able to write the scripts I need for the idea for my site? It doesn't look too hard...</div>

<div style='font: 12pt Arial; text-align: left; '>Depends on what you want them to do.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Not seriously hard, but it will present you with a challenge, I think. I'm basing this on the difficulty you had last semester, so I may be wrong.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>Might as well give some basic advice: start small. Don't try to do everything at once. Figure out a design before you start coding. Buy the O'Reilly "Learning Perl" book.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '><b>Link:</b> <a href="http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/pe ... html">Perl Intro man page</a>

I dunno about you, but I took to Perl like a fish out of water. How thick is that Perl book of yours? If nothing else, you could probably get away with reading the Perl man pages here...</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>I didn't have any difficulty with Perl either. But I think both of us had more programming experience than Tessian when we first started.

I'm big on having reference books. I'd much rather look something up in a book than look it up on the web. I also like to read books like that cover to cover - it really helps in understanding the subtleties of a language.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>-- It needs to be able to allow people to register an account as well as change preferences such as a picture or little things like that that would appear at the top of their rants as a small info thing.

-- the ability to log in of course. I'm assuming I'll need to learn how to use cookies but I wouldn't care if the user had to re-enter their login information everytime they posted a rant or wanted to change their info. In the beginning at least.

-- needs to be able to add rants people submit to a database on the server (in txt I'm assuming) and be able to be retrieved and displayed in a template upon request.

-- needs to be able to organize a listing of all rants in the database in a number of ways (date submitted, alphabetical by title and author, by rating, etc) For things like a Top 5 list on the front page and New This Week as well as for general sorting in the list of rants.

-- the ability for registered users to rate a rant (I'm assuming this would be a separate script simply tied to a rant's ID number or something).

-- Later on, of course, the ability to edit the rants...but I wouldn't be too concerned about this right away.

There are probably a few other things it would need to do but as of now that's all I can think of right now.

I am currently trying to get through some perl online courses Penn State offers for free...so far it doesn't look like this would be monumental...but if this turns out too hard to even think about chances are I'll shy away from it and forget the idea :\</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>As for learning right now-- I'll see how far I can get with these online courses then try that Perl man stuff...if even that discourages me I'll buy the book</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>I do notice that at least the basics are just like that in C++, but yeah-- besides my previous semester in Intro to Programming (C++) I don't have much programming experience</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>The syntax is C-like, but many aspects of the language itself are not.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>Ot</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>For example, with most functions, you don't have to have enclose parathesis with everything:

print INPUTSTREAM "Hey!"
print(INPUTSTREAM, "Hey!")

There's a lot of variance in the syntax that makes things easier.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>Definitely recommend "Learning Perl" over the Camel book, which is kind of lame for learnig perl (presents some concept out of order, doesn't explain some, explains some badly, etc). Mostly though, because it doesn't teach Perl in the best way to learn it. Very good reference book though...</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>Get up to speed on the syntax of the language and how to use modules and you'll be off and running. But IMO, learning how to put together working software for nontrivial projects is the "hard" part.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>Pffft...the perlfunc man page is my reference.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>well...I read that page and all, most of it I already learned in the course...I guess my problem so far is I don't exactly see how most of these features are useful / used</div>

<div style='font: 10pt verdana; text-align: left; padding: 0% 10% 0% 10%; '>That's not the sort of thing I was talking about. Undeclared variables, extremely loose typing, list vs. scalar context - concepts, not syntax.</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>Also an excellent reference, but sort of inconvenient if you're away from your computer...</div>

<div style='font: 11pt "EngraversGothic BT", "Copperplate Gothic Light"; text-align: left; '>Why would you be referenecing to Perl without a computer? Writing a Perl program on paper?</div>

<div style='font: 14pt "Sans Serif"; text-align: justify; padding: 0% 15% 0% 15%; '>Study up on something or whatever. You don't do ALL your programming related work at a computer do you? *tsk tsk tsk*</div>