First computer language

Stephen R Laniel steve at laniels.org
Mon Aug 15 13:59:03 UTC 2005


On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 09:50:27AM -0400, Rajiv Vyas wrote:
> I am thinking about learning Perl (other possibilities are Python,
> Ruby and Lisp). This will be my first computer language. Any
> suggestions on which books I should buy for absolute beginners in
> programming and perl?

The Dummies books are actually good, even though they are
named badly. Probably there's a Dummies guide to
programming. Really what you want, as an absolute beginner,
is some understanding of the logic of computer programming
generally. In my experience, people without any programming
experience find the if/then/else construct confusing.

The "Learning Perl" book is quite good. If you breeze
through that, the next step up is "Programming Perl," which
is great.

I'm curious whether you'd find the Kernighan and Ritchie
book on C ("The C Programming Language") digestible. I came
to it with some experience in programming already; it may
not be as easy for a new programmer, though you should take
a look at it and see whether it makes sense.

What you want is an introduction to the syntax that
you'll be seeing in virtually every program you ever
encounter. In Perl, C, and C++ you'll see things like

for( my $i = 0; $i < $someNumber; $i++ ) {
	someAction();
}

though that uses some Perl-specific idioms (namely the
dollar signs). In C and C++ the same thing would look
like

int i, someNumber;
for( i = 0; i < someNumber; i++ ) {
	someAction();
}

Point being: learning a bit of syntax should help you with a
large number of languages.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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