Perl for Web Site Management

Programming

One area where you certainly will never run out of things to learn is that of programming. The phenomenon of accidental programmers who use Perl as their 0th programming language is a relatively new one, but real programming is a complex and demanding discipline with a long history. To the extent you find yourself focusing more on programming than on other aspects of developing web sites, you will necessarily find yourself travelling farther and farther down the path of the programmer.

A Programmer’s Editor

One of the first things you probably will find yourself doing in that case is learning to use a real programmer’s editor. In the Unix world that traditionally has meant either vi or Emacs (mentioned briefly in a sidebar in Chapter 1). I can’t advise you much in either case, since I’ve kept one foot firmly enough planted in the Windows world that my primary text editor is still a shareware Windows program called UltraEdit (http://www.ultraedit.com/). But having seen what someone well-versed in vi can do in terms of lightning-fast editing, I have no illusions about who would win a speed contest, and one of these days I really am going to learn vi, I swear. In the meantime, I normally get by when editing under Unix with jpico , the pico-flavored version of the joe editor.

Revision-Control Systems

Besides a good text editor, another essential tool of the programmer is a revision-control system. The standard revision-control system used in the Unix world is called RCS. ...