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numpy, matplotlib, any of the neural network libraries

I suggest you read this posting

In Perl we have these same capabilities and tools if not more:

        PDL - The Perl Data Language, which has:
                N-dimensional array objects
                integrated scientific computing libraries for science, mathematics engineering
                integrated 2D plotting libraries via PGPLOT and PLplot
                integrated 3D graphics libraries via OpenGL and TriD
                and much more...
        Statistics::R, Statistics::useR - basic integration between Perl and R for statistical computing
        ExtUtils::XSpp and SWIG - interoperability between C++ and Perl
        Countless other libraries on CPAN for math, science, engineering (just look at Math::*, Statistics::* namespaces for example)
 

As for neural networks, try this

I always thought Perl was an abomination. Mind you I once got roped into writing some test code in Perl. And it was surprisingly OK. The code was structured into a bunch of functions and it was like writing C. Well except Perl at that point had no function prototypes so you had to manually make sure when you called something you passed things in the right order.

Another Perlism that I disliked was what happens when you pass two arrays and some scalars into a function they all get scrunched into one big list. So you need to pass by reference explicitly

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node...

But you know what? Apart form that it wasn't too bad. These days I mostly use Python for scripting, but Perl is honestly not a bad language.

I think it's like VBScript. VBScript is terrible language but the last time I used that I was mostly building up a bunch of strings to pass into MS-SQL. Similarly the last time I used Perl it was actually generating C code which was then compiled and run. And a Perl script checked the logs to see which tests had passed. Basically the system was a way to automate testing code on a bunch of embedded platforms and some emulated ones to make sure nothing broke. Perl was actually OK for that.

I am sorry, how is $$this->{that} for readability? If you still have doubts please show this to a non-zealot for comment.

I don't think I've ever needed a reference to a reference to a hash. More common constructs are more readable.

- In-place string modification is asking for bugs

Perl now has a regex modifier ('r') to return the modified string instead of modifying in place. Regardless, there was always:
( my $new_string = $old_string ) =~ s/this/that/;

Pretty sure I used most of these. These (and the rest of them) is a pittance compared to libraries available for Python. But the quality of libraries also leaves much to desire, for example this: The Pitfall, in none other than the DBI module having crippled parametrized ODBC interface. There are other examples. Let's just say I was pleased to discover after transition that most of the work has been done for me, all that is left is to connect the libraries in the desired manner.

I've been equally less that impressed by some of Python's libraries, e.g., the netrc (and ftp) library. netrc is broken, and unlike Perl, it is not transparently integrated into the ftp library.

- Hard to read code with multiple '$'s and '@'s on every line

I prefer to have variables differentiated (scalars, arrays and hashes) and clearly identified from other syntax or text. It makes code more readable IMHO.

I am sorry, how is $$this->{that} for readability? If you still have doubts please show this to a non-zealot for comment.

- In-place string modification is asking for bugs

You mean string interpolation? This in fact is one of Perl strengths

$str = "There are $num apples".

is clearer and less busy, easier to remember than

str = "I have {a} apples".format(a=num)

No I do not mean interpolation, but all the regex transformations modify string in place, sometimes inadvertently destroying needed stuff. Python takes the opposite approach -- to NEVER modify string in place. Compare
$text =~ s/^ *//;
$text =~ s/ *$//;
to
text = text.strip()
Perl modified the string in-place in each line, while in Python I made an explicit assignment (normally not needed)
Going back to your example, it's s = "I have {} apples".format(num), and you omitted a semicolon in Perl statement ;)

- Poor selection of publicly available libraries; some have critical bugs that have not been fixed for years

Now you are well into troll territory or you really haven't used Perl much. DBI, CGI, LWP, IO::Socket, HTML::Parser, GetOpt::Long, Devel::NYTProf (not really a module but a totally awesome profiler) the list goes on.

Pretty sure I used most of these. These (and the rest of them) is a pittance compared to libraries available for Python. But the quality of libraries also leaves much to desire, for example this: The Pitfall, in none other than the DBI module having crippled parametrized ODBC interface. There are other examples. Let's just say I was pleased to discover after transition that most of the work has been done for me, all that is left is to connect the libraries in the desired manner.

Indeed, ANY language feature can be abused.

Let's abuse whitespace! O_o

Since /. formatting for code is SO fucked up that I can't even paste the source code, here's a link to it ..

  * https://gist.github.com/cgoldb...
  * http://www.perlmonks.org/?node...

Perl is indeed a lot better than its reputation. Perhaps Larry should shave off his moustache already.

I just wrote a small forty-line script an hour ago. Perl has become my default language for some reason. Haven't really written anything in other languages in years.

Oh, hell. A small diversion. Since I'm in a place where people seem to hate Perl, I'll give them a bait. Here's some code I wrote to help a forum poster. I'm quite proud of it. Please tell me how indecipherable and ugly it (and by extension, Perl) looks.

The lispy way of writing (map { block } @list as opposed to procedural for (@list) { block } or OO @list.each { block }) and chaining functions/transformations feels like a natural way to express many things, even though it's in 'reverse' order. Really strange.

Most of all I think I like the whole list/array distinction. Combined with the lispy functions, it's really handy sometimes to smash multiple arrays into an on-the-fly list to throw it into a map or something.

I'm also fond of Ruby and C. Java's verbosity and forced OO is painful. Can't understand Python for some reason. People say Python's 'like natural language' but I still can't decipher it. Must be Ruby's fault. Ruby and Python are said to be mutually exclusive -- once you learn one, you can't bring yourself to learn the other, since they feel so similar. So I've been indoctrinated with Ruby. (This happened before I became aware of Rails, btw.)

Is this some sort of thinly-veiled, implicit slur against the role of Christian people within the Perl 6 community?

Yeah, the creator of http://www.perlmonks.org/ (the coolest perl community) has changed been baptized. Do you have a problem with that? In case you didn't know, he's been called one of the "ten greats of Monking".

The Perl 6 community isn't like the Ruby community. They aren't a bunch of immature men who seek to hate and demonize religion, likely out of latent athiesim. The people of Perl 6 are tolerant and accepting. They want you to be who you really are, and they want you to help contribute to the greatness that they're building. You can be a Christian, or Jew, or one than the other or or anything in between or anything else, really. The people working on Perl 6 don't care. It's all about great software, not discrimination and hatred. Discrimination and hatred have no place in the modern world. That's why we don't find them when working with Perl 6. Perl 6 is about love, care, tolerance and friendship. It's not about making people feel bad just because they are who they are.

I've heard, but never timed it myself, that perl is faster for regexp-type stuff than even the specialized tools, just from the massive amount of optimization it has accrued over the years; here is a completely unbiased source. Use a perl or python script, and consider using Storable (perl) or pickle (python) to serialize the data structure, I guess, but just having the whole list in memory will help.

According to this, perl regexps are (unsurprisingly) a superset of egrep's.

I don't see how introducing SQL could do much to help speed, or anything else, in this application.

Aha! Yeah, never do that. In perl, this behaviour of the short-circuiting || (or) operator was noticed, so they extended the return value to provide a freaky combo if statement inspired by the ternary operator. It's simultaneously brilliant and revolting, like most things in perl.

Perl poetry looks only marginally better than Vogon poetry.

You don't say. I want to see someone writing this in something other than Perl.

I use Python (and C, C++, C#, Java, etc), but love Perl.
It allows me to be as eloquent or dilinquent as I want to be.
If I want to blast out a concept, nothing gets there faster than Perl.
Learning Idiomatic Perl requires a shift in the way one approaches programming. To do it well, it does require learning Perl from a Perl-perspective, and I think that's where most new programmers stumble. They want a C-based language that won't require them to change how they think about programming code--because they all code in C even when they're using Java, or Python.

C programmers can program Perl too, of course... (that's how I started). Perl allows that, but you'll never really touch its brilliance if you stick to that approach. A great way to get started learning it is to find a community like http://perlmonks.org/ and start reading and posting questions about how to approach problems with a Perl-brain, rather than a C(Python, Java, whatever)-brain.

I believe doing so will actually make you a better C(Python, Java, whatever) programmer as well...

It'll be nice if there could be a JIT or some other accelerator for Perl.

I have seen some old posts about attempts to port Perl's interpreter to LLVM to be able to take advantage of its JIT facility. As far as I can tell, it didn't went too far. (The most discussion I can find. But about work from 2008-'09.)

Main obstacle for Perl's advancement and progress is the Perl6.

You can't change the Perl5 because a lot of stuff depends on it.

You can't make new version of Perl out of Perl5 because Perl6 is already out there.

All in all, I strongly believe that it is the miserable failure of Perl6 what's killing any potential progress the Perl could have made.

Right now, the best thing which could happen to Perl IMO is a fork of the Perl5. Yet, since user/developer base is declining, I very much doubt that would happen.

Languages which are simple to learn (c++, for example)

WHAT?

Ahem. "Languages which are simple to learn (c++, for example)".

Perl has lots more reserved words than c++.
        (Examples: "say", "not", "and", "open")

Perl has lots more operators than c++
        (Example: "//" is an operator in perl. So is "<=>", "+/*", "..", and "eq").
        (See if you can understand the flip flop operator on first reading.)

Perl has several contexts, and the meaning of an operator or function is context dependent.
        (Example contexts: "scalar", "list", "null", "string")
        (Example differences: Saying "$i = sort @array" has a completely different meaning from "@i = sort @array")

Perl distinguishes a variable from its value.
        (Example: $i = 12; followed by $i = "twelve". The same variable, points to one of two values in memory. C++ binds the variable to the memory location, perl does not. Programmers have trouble wrapping their mind around this.)

Perl references are not pointers (but have some similarities). C++ programmers have a hard time with this also.

Perl has all the overloading and class syntax found in c++.

Perl doesn't have a precompiler.

That's partly because it was your first (or one of your few) programs in Perl. You likely made things more complicated than needed for lack of knowledge and experience.
I've always said that Perl is a good fit for programmers who can recall dozens of "idioms" (memes), and keep their understanding of its unique semantics fresh. Things like keys %{ {map {$_=>1} @list} } (implementing unique(@list)) and internalizing that every expression is ultimately evaluated as a list. Some are silly, but there's little argument about its expressiveness and flexibility.

I wrote the following entry on perlmonks.org several years ago. http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=473080 It's nothing specific to the language, so I'll just copy verbatim here.

One, I have a rule I teach to any programmer under my supervision: strategy in comments, tactics in code. Tactics are what you do to get something done. Strategy explains what you want done. In warfare, an officer focuses on strategy: "secure that hill!" "pick the best two devices!" "find the local minimum!" Don't mention the tools you use to get that job done, soldier, unless you're being fiendishly clever. Comments should be in natural human language, while the code should just accomplish those tasks.

Two, I have a technique I teach to any new programmer, whether they're under my supervision or not: write the comments first. Programming courses always talk about writing pseudocode: why write it on scratch paper, just to throw it away?

sub process_ring_packet
{
-# if we have a prior server registered,
--# if this packet was received from the prior,
---# if this server created this packet originally,
----# kill the packet, it's completed the trip.
-# scan the packet for all object references.
-# dispatch packet to object mentioned which we control.
-# if any object references remain unhandled,
--# if we have a next server registered,
---# send the packet to the next server.
}

Once the pseudocode is written in human terms, then fill in your actual code in whatever computer language is being employed. Note that I didn't say HOW to do each of the tasks in the comments. I just wrote what needed to get done. Lastly, as others have indicated, the actual code should not be too clever for your teammates to understand at a glance. Use clear concise words for variable names, without abbreviating them unnecessarily. Use the idioms they're familiar with. Use the language they're familiar with. You shouldn't need any # swap $x and $y comments to explain basic tasks or idioms. If you really find a clever but unusual trick, or you need to hack out something that's not obvious, then you can mention it.

I have taught my editors to highlight tags like #REVIEW: #TODO: #BUGBUG: #HACK: so I can see areas that need more attention. Review things which may or may not be right or done in the best way. List things that are definitely undone but needed. Mark areas where known bugs are located, even if the fix isn't in there yet; give bug tracking numbers if appropriate. Mark code which is overly clever to get around dumb library limitations or which save a lot of processing in obscure ways.

(Of course, the slash ecode tag and lameness filter fought my attempts to include the pseudocode example, where indentation is useful.)

Perl hard to read? I beg to differ!
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=963133

Perl is a beautiful language. I love the use of list operators and the concept of list context. Every symbol has meaning. No language does a better job of incorporating and taking full advantage of regular expressions. There are plenty of modules to assist in specific tasks, and because it doesn't enforce one programming paradigm, it allows those who use it the chance to be flexible and still maintain good structure if that's what's key. It takes some time to learn, but the benefits are rich and well worth the experience. The community is very mature, and there's a lot of free and minimally cost-based training available, without the fear of running to the edge of what's feasible or buggy. I highly suggest my favorite perl experts site: http://perlmonks.org/ if you want to learn the language. There are some amazing experts there, willing to share their knowledge and expertise, and thousands of tutorials and helpful comments.

...as would other programmers who have been changed from a Perl programmer to a "Pearl" programmer, COBOL program to "COBALT" programmer, etc. by a well-meaning, but tech-inept recruiter.

CPAN is the world's largest repository of software; all of it tested; all of it free. It is also 18 years old. Yes, there are some modules in it that were the best in their time but have been surpassed by more modern modules but some of them were so well written that nothing modern has replaced them. To determine what module would be best for your application, I suggest you ask. Sites like PerlMonks http://perlmonks.org/ are happy to answer any question.

I love exploring timelines. Nearly thirty years ago, I wanted to implement a general timeline visualization tool like this. I've dabbled now and then but not gotten serious about it. Finding Best Tag Sets for Timeline Browsing

That said, I think a key feature will be to offer timelines on different continua. Fiction is one reason: A timeline of Frank Herbert's Dune universe or Tolkien's LotR Middle Earth should not be matched to our objective understanding of Earth's history. Another reason is an exemplar of a generic time sequence. There is a whole chapter in Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears (I think) which describes, nanosecond by nanosecond, the stages of a thermonuclear explosion. Being able to relate such generic sequences is useful, even if they aren't pinned to a specific historical mark on the greater timeline of years.

DBD::WMI
Win32::OLE
Win32::WMIC
Win32::GuiTest
Win32::TieRegistry
Win32::Unicode
Win32::API
Inline::C
Perl::Dist::WiX
Win32::MSI::HighLevel
http://search.cpan.org/search?query=win32&mode=dist
http://roth.net/
http://books.perl.org/books
Perl Books - Book: Perl for System Administration
http://www.perl.com/
http://strawberryperl.com/
http://www.cava.co.uk/citrusperl/strawberry.html
google:// site:http://perlmonks.org/

I think Perl is a fantastic language--in fact it's my favorite language of all time. Heck, I just released a new tool at my work last week using Perl and CGI to help organize about 4 years worth of file changes from an active CVS archive into relevant categories.

Perl's not a language for the faint-hearted, however. It is not a language you sit down and instantly you have a webpage going--which is what most people want to do these days when it comes to casual programming. For that, PHP and Ruby seem to be a lot more accessible.

I've been using Perl for over ten years now, and I find that I'm still learning something new about how to use the language in fascinating ways--pretty much every day. Nothing compares to Perl's community. You can talk with experts daily if you like, on sites like http://www.perlmonks.org/ and the documentation is all accessible at http://perldoc.perl.org/ or with every install of perl by just typing perldoc... I love how easy it is to move data about. It really was the first language to fully incorporate hashing as a basic operator and though variable sigils confuse a lot of people used to simpler programming languages, such notation allows for some amazingly flexible operations without the need to create lengthy method calls for every basic operation on your data structures. In Perl every symbol has specific/distinct meaning and interoperates with all others, and those combinations make for some very powerful programs with few lines of code--like how you can load full hashes by acessing them with the array operator as hash slices... and who can compare to Perl's enhanced regular expressions, especially the latest from v. 5.12...

Anyhow there are languages for the pedantic, there are languages for your project managers and your CS grads, and for your code-generators--or for outsourcing to India, and then there's languages that really get your inner geek going... and Perl definitely reigns supreme for my inner geek. :)

In fact, Some people call it magic.

#!/usr/bin/perl -W
use IO::Socket;
srand;
sleep(rand()*600);
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>'api.foursquare.com', PeerPort=>80,
        Proto =>'tcp', Type=>SOCK_STREAM) or die;
$ARGV[1] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005;
$ARGV[2] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005;
my $str = "vid=$ARGV[0]&private=0&geolat=$ARGV[1]&geolong=$ARGV[2]";
print $sock "POST /v1/checkin HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: api.foursquare.com\r\nUser-Agent:" ." Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ " ."(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C10 Safari/419.3\r\nContent" ."-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\nAuthorization: Basic " ."XXXXXX\r\nContent-length: ",
length($str)+2, "\r\n\r\n$str\r\n";
$_=;

The author didn't really even try, so it'll be easy to shorten it. Shortening it a lot is left as further exercise. I'll just get rid of some low-hanging fruit. I'm sure Perlmonks will pick up the challenge if they haven't already.

1. The random number generator is automatically seeded, so get rid of that line.
2. The results from the socket are assigned to a variable, but that variable is not printed or otherwise used. There's a whole line. It might be friendly to read the data waiting, but it's not necessary to the task.
3. Rather than assigning to the command-line arguments, the assignment to $str could have included the random perturbations, so there's two more lines.

#!/usr/bin/perl -W
use IO::Socket;
sleep(rand()*600);
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>'api.foursquare.com', PeerPort=>80,
        Proto =>'tcp', Type=>SOCK_STREAM) or die;
my $str = "vid=$ARGV[0]&private=0&geolat=" . ($ARGV[1] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005)
        . "&geolong=" . ($ARGV[2] += rand() * 0.0001 - 0.00005);
print $sock "POST /v1/checkin HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: api.foursquare.com\r\nUser-Agent:"
        . " Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ " ."(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C10 Safari/419.3\r\nContent" ."-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\nAuthorization: Basic " ."XXXXXX\r\nContent-length: ",
length($str)+2, "\r\n\r\n$str\r\n";

Five logical lines. Actual display lines may of course be different depending upon several factors like attempting to break long lines for viewing and the vagaries of the textual mangling on Slashdot.

But I do keep running into situations where I find myself muttering "This would be so much easier if I could just resolve a prolog expression

Perhaps AI::Prolog or Language::Prolog would be helpful. Or you could take advantage of some of Perl's dustier corners and write Prolog-like Perl.

... I'm actually surprised Perl isn't in the article.

Especially since it has an official cult: The Perl Monks

You can do that with most regex systems. With Perl's you can do even so much more. If you have perl installed, try 'perldoc perlre', or you can readthe perldoc for perl regular expressions on perldoc.perl.org instead.

If you're intrigued by that, stop by Perl.org and PerlMonks. It's a much-maligned language, and for really superficial reasons. The modern best practices for the language answer most of the problems people ever had with it. The rest of the problems are personal preferences stated as fact, PR failures, and hyperbole.

I hear from other people that Perl recruiting is up dramatically over last year. I'm also not actively seeking consulting work; I took my CV offline last year.

Perl's syntax is based off natural language. You should be able to tell the computer what to do in the same way you'd tell another person, with some obvious extra clarity needed.

An unparsable language is not exactly what I would think of first, when "extra clarity" is required.

Funny you should say that.,,

I quite like this reference from the Perl world about understanding large systems: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=788328

A Perl Monks poster has collected the address of 5 different Perl(-related) advent calendars:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=810472

As he says, a "great tradition".

Nothing is as bad as dried ramen sauce

Oh, is that what all that O bollocks means? Some of us live in the real world.

You must be new here.

O-notation is used in describing the complexity of algorithms. Start here http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=573138

Also it suggests that the password is stored in clear text in their database, a big worry.

Wow. What kind of idiots would store passwords in clear text?

Amen.
Don't forget to menion http://perlmonks.org/.
The other anti-Christ: Python
Proof is here BTW: http://xkcd.com/224/

The only limitations of a perl programmer are those imposed by his own biological weaknesses. The Truly Enlightened understand this and patiently await your journey into the never-ending along the righteous path of of sigils, regular expressions, context.

It's far more important that I know the performance quirks of my language of choice -- for instance, string interpolation is faster than any sort of string concatenator, which is faster than straight-up string concatenation ('foo' + 'bar').

This reminds me of a very educational example. On Perl forums sometimes the question arises: which is faster - single quotes or double quotes, the difference being that the latter interpolates variables.

People in the know pointed it out multiple times that the single vs. double quote issue is a benchmarking mistake. See, Perl is a VM based language, with compile time optimizations. The code that people write as single or double quotes gets compiled down to the same thing. This is the kind of knowledge that is useful, knowing a bit of the theory and design of the underlying language, instead of having benchmark results, but not knowing how to interpret the results...

I use local versions of JavaScript sometimes with Firebug, but it's not exactly the interface to use for casual browsing. I like his idea to make it a browser feature with a good UI.

As for sites that allow custom JavaScript, I can think of one example from the top of my head that actually stores the user's custom JavaScript code and sends it back out, possibly with a reference to a remote script from elsewhere. That site is Perlmonks, and the mechanism used there is a "free nodelet" that gives a user a sidebar to hold pretty much any content up to a certain size that they see as part of the sidebar nodelets when they are logged in. Lots of members of the site have JavaScript in their free nodelet that enhances the site for them in some way without imposing it site-wide for all users. You can even see in the PerlMonks Discussion section (and sometimes other sections) posts where the members share their work with others with "Free Nodelet Hack" in the title. Here's a sample.

You wouldn't have to have a dynamically generated site. Just having class and id attributes for certain entities goes a long way toward letting JavaScript manipulate them easily through the DOM. It helps if those attributes are consistent, meaningful, and infrequently changed.

Perl 5 isn't really bytecode at all. It basically just walks the parse tree directly.

Perl 6/Parrot is bytecode just as those from Python or Java have come to expect. Perl 5 could be reimplemented this way, but nobody seems to want to bother.

If your goal is to obfuscate your code to prevent people from copying it, please give up.

A Mac is a genuine Unix workstation that is much easier to administer, and has much better software and hardware support than Linux.

Apart from if you want to run the most popular scripting language.

Yeah, you would never have such problems using HP UX or Solaris. Okay, but you won't have problems runnig RedHat

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.par/2008/11/msg3821.html

I've built the perl binary with pp on HP UX 11.23 & while running the same on another test machine, the build fails with the following error:

IO object version 1.22 does not match bootstrap parameter 1.23 at /opt/perl_32/lib/5.8.8/IA64.ARCHREV_0-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 252. Compilation failed in require at /opt/perl_32/lib/5.8.8/IA64.ARCHREV_0-thread-multi/IO/Handle.pm line 263.

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=490413

I ask the assistance of the monks concerning error reports I am getting from some -- but not all -- automated testers at testers.cpan.org.

t/02_bad_constructor..............IO object version 1.21 does not matc +h bootstrap parameter 1.22 at /usr/local/perl-5.8.5/lib/5.8.5/sun4-so +laris-thread-multi/DynaLoader.pm line 253.

Add to that the problems with RedHat Linux mentioned in TFA, you don't need Perl for pattern matching.

Camel Code

once upon a time there was a vigorous discussion on perlmonks about non-perl books that have made people better programmers...

http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=508862

my reply...

http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=509146

        * CLR
        * The Dragon Book
        * The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
        * AI: A Modern Approach
        * Catcher in the Rye
            -- I've been asked about this one. This book is all about perceptions: our perceptions of others, and our concerns about the perception other people have of ourself. Realizing your own hangups, and when you/others are being "phoney" can vastly reduce the amount of bullshit you waste time on in your life/work.

once upon a time there was a vigorous discussion on perlmonks about non-perl books that have made people better programmers...

http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=508862

my reply...

http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=509146

        * CLR
        * The Dragon Book
        * The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
        * AI: A Modern Approach
        * Catcher in the Rye
            -- I've been asked about this one. This book is all about perceptions: our perceptions of others, and our concerns about the perception other people have of ourself. Realizing your own hangups, and when you/others are being "phoney" can vastly reduce the amount of bullshit you waste time on in your life/work.

He's just welcoming our new Zombie Overlords

.

I have found also a steady decline in newsgroups over the years, to the point where they are unusable because of narrow minded jerks with an axe to grind, or an agenda to push.

Try finding any technical info on say the Internet Explorer "Operation Terminated" bug, and the responses are filled with assholes saying "Use Firefox". Whether that is good advice or not is not the issue, but it's downright annoying when all these "wanna-be-experts" pollute supposed technical forums with bullshit just to satisfy their egos / post counts / reputations, even though they have nothing constructive to add to the discussion.

To be honest, I lean towards the established forums now, such as http://perlmonks.org/ for Perl related stuff etc ... it's the only way you'll get anything remotely pertinent, and not "politically" tainted.

Suits who pick the technology are usually wrong, and seldom obeyed.

Strawberry Perl and ActivePerl are both pretty nice packages. Many Win32 modules like Win32::OLE, Win32::API, and more in the Win32 and Win32API namespaces are perfectly usable.

The places most qualified to answer specific questions are probably comp.lang.perl.moderated (or maybe comp.lang.perl.misc) and Perlmonks. I don't know too much first-hand about PerlGuru, but they do have a section specific to Win32 programming with Perl and I've heard some good things.

PerlMonks is the right place to ask this question, IMO. You'll be posing the question to a lot of very experienced Perl users who might have similar experiences to yours, or good advice on what to do next. The PM community is friendly and very helpful as well.

Here's what I got, so far. Sorry it's not tabbed and cross-referenced...

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/17/224230 -- in case anyone wants this page, too
http://www.quickref.org/
http://gotapi.com/
http://www.regular-expressions.info/ -- regular expressions
http://www.perlmonks.org/
http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://perldoc.perl.org/
http://www.perlbuzz.com/
http://java.sun.com/reference/
http://forums.sun.com/index.jspa
http://developer.mozilla.org/ -- javascript
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Advanced.html
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/
http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/011/firstcss
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/learning
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Tcl
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmonkeys/book/c_guide/
http://cprogramming.com/
http://www.cplusplus.com/
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/
http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/
http://en.wikibooks.org/
http://developer.apple.com/
http://cocoadev.com/
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/

http://www.perlmonks.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)
http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/
http://srfi.schemers.org/
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
http://www.quickref.org/
http://java.sun.com/javase/reference/api.jsp
http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://cprogramming.com/
http://www.stackoverflow.com/
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/
http://yutaka.is-a-geek.net/
http://www.gotapi.com/
http://www.open-rsc.org/
http://www.users.bigpond.com/robin_v/resource.htm
http://www.geocities.com/orion_blastar/contact/
http://en.wikibooks.org/

But remember that 90% of everything is crap; I'd be vary of considering any code well written by default. Especially considering that Perl appears to be optimised towards unintelligible :)
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=494663