… or at least finished the first step, Learning Perl. I made it through the whole thing without absolutely needing to peer into the back for the answers to any of the exercises. I did manage to complete an exercise or three in possibly the ugliest lines of code ever concieved – and checked the back to confirm that the easy way I didn’t think could possibly work was in fact the way I should have done it in the first place. I will definitely keep the book as a reference when I get stuck, which is bound to happen.

A lot of the scripts I’ve written were done in Python, but had very clunky and not very flexible methods for text manipulation. I doubt that is very much the language’s fault, and more my misuse of its various builtin functions. That said, I’ve found it much more efficient and flexible to rewrite several of them in Perl. When I redeploy to Ft. Benning, I’ll have to get deeper into Perl, for now I’ll keep rewriting Python scripts, and looking at other people’s Perl scripts to see what how they do what they do.