Beginning

I've decided to start this blog because I'm just starting out on my perl journey and I think that I learn the best by writing everything down and explaining it in my own words as if I were explaining it to someone else. I think this is a good way to know that you truly understand something, even Einstein said:

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

so this is what I'm hoping to achieve.

I have done a bit of perl before on my grad scheme. I got the chance to try perl out and this was about six months ago. At the time I was trying to learn quickly so I could get up to speed with everyone else and actually contribute to the team. This meant I started off learning things by heart rather than really understanding what I was writing. Now it's the end of my grad scheme and I have a permanent job in Perl so I want to start from the beginning again and learn things properly because this is now the start of my development career.

I want to do this properly, which means starting at the very beginning, looking at everything I come into contact with and asking why it's there, what is it's purpose, rather than just accepting it and learning it off by heart without really knowing what it means. I think in this way, I may be learning more slowly but I will be learning completely and understanding everything and hopefully in the future I will be able to pick up Perl concepts more quickly because of this.

I do have a background in computer science, I have a degree from UCL so I've been programming before for a while with my main language being Java. Now, Java and I haven't really been the best of friends and unfortunately it was what was mostly taught. I did some Prolog, Groovy and a hell of a lot of theoretical stuff - logic, maths etc but mostly Java. I'm not really sure why I didn't get on with it, maybe it's because there's so much faff to get anything working, so much code to write to do on simple thing. Maybe it's because I started off behind everyone else and never really caught up - I don't really know. What I do know is that when I started learning Perl, it seemed to me so much easier to understand and so much easier to get started and make things work.

I've called this blog "Perl Adventures" because it feels like I'm at the beginning of a very long and slightly overwhelming journey. It's like I've just stepped off the plane and I am in this new world that I can go and explore. I'm not really sure where to start and I'm not really sure what's out there, but I am little bit excited to find out. - That's enough of the cheesy metaphor.

It's not my main intention, but hopefully I will be able to help other people in the same situation as me.
I'm hoping in this way to shed light on some of the concepts of perl for other people to learn about because I know that finding information about perl isn't the easiest thing in the world. I've often googled a perl term that I don't understand and then been greeted with many more terms I don't understand and then have to google all of those! So maybe if I use the approach of never explaining things with words I don't understand, I can get concepts across that others can really understand.

Here goes, wish me luck!