Recommend a book

[Linda Hyman]

Wow, have I ever gotten a Perl education in the last hour or so ...tee hee!
It's what I love about the net though.  There are alot of people out there
who have responded.  How about specifically listing some advantages and
disadvantages of Perl and JavaScript?  We might as well turn this into a
focused learning opportunity, and then we'll have the beginnings of a good
comparative list on our Web4Lib archive for later reference.   This last
response is a good start.

My original, broad statement--
>> You might want to check out JavaScript though before you go to deeply into
>>yucky old PERL.

Last response I've received--(PS, what does "gak" mean? Is that some new
computer lingo? ...only kidding)
>Seriously though, I don't see Javascript as supplanting Perl in any way.
>You said yourself that Javascript will do _client_side_ work on _Netscape_.
>You've limited your audience right there.  Perl (or any other language on a
>server) will handle all clients from Lynx to Netscape to (gak) MS Internet
>Explorer.
>
>Netscape does not intend for Javascript to supplant Perl.  It is supposed to
>allow the client to handle the mundane tasks (data verification) so that the
>server can be freed up for more interesting and difficult scripting - such
>as serving custom pages.  There will be many uses for perl on the server
>side of the equation.
>
>If anything will supplant Perl it will be automated clinet-server interfaces
>(perhaps SQL based) to backend relational databases.

Linda Woods Hyman-Education First Initiative
Pacific Bell/San Diego State University
Dept. of Educational Technology
San Diego  CA  92182  (619) 594-4414
e-mail:  lhyman at mail.sdsu.edu
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired