Really good Perl book under a secretive title

Since I've been doing a lot of LDAP programming lately, I finally broke down and bought O'Reilly's LDAP System Administration.  I found a used paperback for $4!  While I was waiting, I got impatient and bought the Kindle version for my Android phone.  I just bought it for the LDAP ACL info but I was thrilled to see chapter 10 was devoted to Perl-LDAP.  It explained a lot of things in the Perl-LDAP example code that I hadn't seen explained before (I'm sure it's out there but the author has done a nice job of digging it all up and putting it together).  Anyway, if you're looking for a nice LDAP book, this is looking like a good one so far (still reading).

New technology I'm Working On

I find that people often think because I work primarily on UNIX/Linux and still use Perl that I'm not learning anything new or that I do not like learning.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I love new technology and I'm always learning something new.

Here's what I've been working on in the last year:

• Solaris Zones and Containers
• Solaris Zetabyte File system (ZFS)
• GNU Screen
• Ruby
• More Perl LDAP programming
• More Perl programming in general 
• Rakudo (a Perl 6 distro)
• PUGS (another Perl 6 distro)
• SQLite3 and Perl
• RCS (Revision Control System) 

Here's the list of what I hope to cover this year VERY SOON:

• Solaris LDOMs (need a lab experiment)
• See how ZFS is implemented under other OS's (e.g. FreeBSD)
• Use More Ruby! (and I'm looking at a Rails book from the library)
• Juniper's JunOS (I like the XML and the idea of scripting with Perl)
• MORE Rakudo!!  (Not so much Pugs) I hope to contribute bug reports
• Sun's Dtrace (especially using Perl and Dtrace)
• Xen and Linux - need a lab experiment
• Btrfs - Linux's answer to ZFS?  Need to explore in a lab.
• Lots more SQLite (I really like that tool)

 And, of course, my on going quests: (not necessarily in this order)

• Python (Because Zope runs on it!)
• Plone (runs on Zope)
• C - need to refreshen my C programming skills - getting rusty
• Java 
• Command line Sun VirtualBox
• I'm sure there's a few more...

Anyway, this list keeps me pretty busy without doing anything much with any Windows projects.  I can get around fine, IMO, on Windows. Just because I don't have any Windows projects on my plate doesn't mean I'm not learning anything new.  Besides - aren't there plenty of others focusing JUST on Windows?

I'm pretty excited about my list (above) and do as much reading and experimenting  as time permits.  It sure seems to me that I'm learning new stuff - Well, I'm learning things that interest me.  I guess because non-Windows things don't interest some I guess it appears that I'm not learning anything (that interests them).  Oh well.  Can't please everyone and I stopped trying long ago.

Perl and SQLite

Finally got around to finishing my little SQLite and Perl program.  To speed things up, I used a shell script with remote SSH commands to grab the data, then used Perl to stuff it into SQLite.  Very cool!   Need to use Perl's Net-SNMP on next version but this was mainly an excuse to use SQLite.  Glad I did.  There's a lot of strangeness - can't get used to putting a dot in front of commands and many of my favorite SQL commands are missing or renamed.  Still - SO COOL to be able to create a database on the fly like that.

Nifty Perl Hack

I threw together a tiny bit of code with the example code from Net::IMAP::Simple to make a program that watches for Mailman unsubscribe messages, logs them, then deletes the message.  It was a 5 minute job (except for the part where my iteration was off by one and kept deleting the wrong message).  Perl is so handy for things like this.

Juniper Switches and Perl

We have some new switches at work - Juniper.  I had a few scripts that could look at a Cisco switch and I could configure and modify Cisco switches.  I had heard that the Juniper switches used Perl.  Looks like they do.  There are quite a few Juniper OS (Junos) Perl modules so maybe this won't be too bad. 

Jr. High Math - Perl to the rescue

My daughter needed a calculator to check square roots last night.  I couldn't believe it - we didn't have one!  Well, I had my beloved HP 15C from engineering school days.  RPN is cool - right?!  Yeah, you can imagine how that went over.  So, then I grabbed a slide rule.  I know!  You guessed it - worse reaction than RPN.  So then I grabbed her Dell netbook, which was running Ubuntu Linux , and wrote a Perl hack that was basically

   #!/usr/bin/perl
   print "Enter a number\n";
   $number = stdin;
   chomp $number;
   $root = sqrt $number;
   print "The square root of $number is $root\n";

Ha!  It worked and she used it.  Perl to the rescue!

Programming for kids

I'm always on the lookout for books to get my kids interested in programming - you know - easy introductions.  I recently found one while following a link off of PerlBuzz called Falling out of love with a language.  In this, the author talks about getting bored with Perl and then discovering Ruby which was described as "Perl done right".  I was intrigued so I googled and found a list of the best Ruby books.  I then ordered this one used from Amazon:

Learn to Program, Second Edition (The Facets of Ruby Series)

I was really impressed with Ruby.  I ran through the 20 minute tutorial and then started reading this book.  The book is great!  The author teaches children so he knows how to hold your attention.  It's fun!  I honestly have never in my life seen a  better introduction to programming for kids or beginners.  So, hopefully, the kids will enjoy learning Ruby this summer.  I'm pretty sure my son will like the idea of programming an old style, text based adventure game.  When they're done with that, I'll show them Perl.

Love the New System Admin w/Perl book (and RCS)!

I've been doing a bit of Perl-LDAP programming and I had always found the 2000 version of Perl for System Administration to be really helpful - especially the tutorials in the appendix (more on that in a bit). I just got the the new version: Automating System Administration with Perl. I was amazed at how much more useful it was. Not only is there 50% more material, ALL of the older stuff has been reworked and freshened. The LDAP section I was using heavily is MUCH improved. Too much goodness to cover now - check it out yourself!

The reason I decided to make the post was to mention RCS, in the books appendix, the author has a 5 Minute RCS Tutorial which makes a strong case for using RCS instead of all of those other revision control systems. I've tried RSC in the past and I've tried CVS and the guys in the office recently tried to get me to use Mercurial (Wow! Talk about overkill for what I do!!) But the authors argument was, this is so simple and easy for your small scripts lying around - why not use it. I was initially daunted by all of the commands and things you could do when I had looked at it years ago but the author distilled it down to a handful of commands. I am going to distill it down further:

1) Check in and unlock your program (leaving a copy):
$ ci -u program
2) To edit, check out and lock your program:
$ co -l program
3) View your revision logs:
$ rlog program

So far, that works well enough for me. Be sure to read the whole 5 Minute RCS Tutorial (see link above). I wish I had used this on my most recent, arduous LDAP programming job. Instead made numbered versions and left them lying all over. I then had to open them to see why this one was named program-4 and how it differed from program-3, etc. I know - silly. Should've stuck with this when I looked at in in 1997 (Hey! I remember the project that caused me to consider rcs then - that's not weird!)