Re: FW: FW: The repeated/quoted text in your message

[<puff -at- guild -dot- net>]

> John Posada wondered:
> > If you weren't a programmer, but you wanted to increase your strength
> > as a technical writer by adding a programming ability, what would you
> > go for that would satisfy the following conditions:
>  
> > 2) Can get into without having taken the customary path of
> > basic/Cobol/c

     Er, who told you this was the customary path?  Well, BASIC as a
starter is probably quite common, BASIC was one of the few accessible
languages for beginners a couple decades ago.  C is still the king of
"real programming", although it's a lot weaker than it was ten years
ago. Java has made some serious inroads, though mostly in the
corporate world, and mostly for applications.

> > 3) Would actually be of value to those looking at resumes.
> > 4) Is not a dead-end and can be leveraged into other ares.

      I know I've written about this before (specificalyl advice
on learning to program for tech writers) but the only thing I can
find on my personal site is this set of advice on making the
career change to programming:

http://darksleep.com/puff/writings/techwritertoprogrammer.html

     Hm, okay, I've dug up two of my old posts to techwrl form
the archive and put them here:

http://darksleep.com/puff/writings/learningtoprograminc.txt
http://darksleep.com/puff/writings/learningtoprograminjavaorperl.txt

     They're fairly up to date, although one nice change is that
windows support for Perl has improved a lot since I wrote that.

> How about Perl? (www.perl.com)

     Perl is a good language to start with.  See my comments in the
third URL above.  Also, if you go up to to darksleep.com/puff you'll
also find a tutorial or two about Perl and some book recommendations
that you may find helpful.

     A very interesting alternative is Python.  Python appears to be
very much like Perl, but more prone to clean code and better supported
for system programming and tasks other than text processing. There's
also a pure-java port of the language, which makes it nice for
multi-level programming (writing an application that uses an embedded,
higher-level programming language for some of the general logic,
giving the user much more control).

> Sure, real programmers might scoff at this scripting language listed

     Not really.  A lot of real programmers use perl here and there,
and for the rest, well most of them are fairly pragmatic.  Perl may be
crufty, but when you compare it to sh, sed, awk, etc, it starts to
look quite reasonable.

> as a reply to a query about programming languages but if you 
> want a skill that'll be useful even if you never work as a Programmer,
> Perl's your tool. 

     Perl can be extremely useful, particularly for text-munging,
which falls squarely in a writer's bailiwick.  
 
> All that, and I've only been at this for a month!

     One of perl's greatest strengths is that it's possible to learn a
little and do a lot.  Unlike other languages where you have to learn a
lot to do a little :-). 
 
Steven J. Owens
puff -at- guild -dot- net

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