Still hacking away at Perl

For the last month or so I have been working on learning Perl again. I now have 11 books on this and am beginning to appreciate the humor side of being a geek at age 61. Oh yes, I am an electrician, but my real aspirations is more on the computer side, I suppose. It all comes from when I was a kid and bought J. E. Thompson's math series of books for the Practical Man when I was 13 years old. I sent away for them after seeing the ad in a magazine when we lived in Ketchikan, Alaska at 11 1/2 mile North Tongas. I will never forget learning how to extract the cube root of a number that I learned from the Arithmetic for the Practical man book. It rained a lot in Ketchikan and I had plenty time to learn from these books and experiment in rocketry. I found some old chemistry books and learned how to make my own black powder. I baked charcoal by placing alder wood in a coffee can on an open fire and bought the saltpeter and sulfur by going to several drug stores in town. I also tried making gun cotton but never got it to work. My rockets turned out to be pipe bombs with one end open. Several blew up and several flew like a pipe in the sky. Well I am getting of the topic here, aren't I? The cube root of a number did amaze me and there was some sort of magic there - just like computers. To me they are magic and every time a program works I feel as if I have approached some God like being because I have created something that works like magic. After 40 years of this, the ah and wonder of computers still amazes me. I started programming with an Olivetti Programma 101 in 1969 that only held 48 instructions on a magnetic card and had no built in functions. I had to write a program to find something as simple as the sine of an angle all in 48 instructions. My next experience was with a HP 2000 that had an 8K drum memory using Fortran 2. My, how things have changed. My present computer now has a one gigabyte RAM and 370 Gigabytes of storage on two hard drives.

Anyway, one of the books I have studied is Teach Yourself Perl in 21 days. It is written by Laura Lemay, who is a technical writer of sorts. She also writes fiction and has a blog at http://blog.lauralemay.com/ if you are interested. Her book is the best of eleven and I wrote her an email to let her know.