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!)

Slackware, Perl, SQLite and SOAP

I was playing around with a project and decided it would be nice to finally try to do something useful with SQLite (and I threw in a SOAP server just-for-fun). I recently reloaded my system with Slackware 13. I was amazed at how easy it was to add Perl modules with Slackware. This is probably making someone out there go "Duh!" but under Fedora and Ubuntu (and Xubuntu, which I use a lot) installing modules on a vanilla system means configuring the CPAN.pm. That's not a big deal but Slackware must have a lot of the CPAN.pm config finished already. It just took off and ran! I had all of the modules I use downloaded in nothing flat and with NONE of the usual haggling I usually have to do to get some of them to load. You have to see it to appreciate it.

Newly Updated www.perl.org looks great!

Just saw this on Perlbuzz: www.perl.org just got a total makeover. Very nicely organized. I like the layout a lot. The "Learning Perl" link has a list of resources which includes video! I never even thought about that before. For example, here's a video of a presentation on Perl's Object Oriented Module (Moose).

DSEE for Solaris 10x86 on OpenSolaris

Ha! Well, not sure how far I'll get bu the first snag was I couldn't proceed because I didn't have SUNWpl5u installed. It turns out SUNWpl5u is Perl 5.8.4 and I do have it installed: It's just called SUNWperl584core. A simple symbolic link and it passes (for now). We'll see how far we get...

Off Topic Post Today

It's also a bit of a cross-posting. I'm a UNIX systems administrator - a computer geek. I also raise and race pigeons. So, this article really grabbed my attention! It was an article about racing pigeons on SlashDot. Evidently, someone wrote an RFC for the Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. That is, sending data using racing pigeons! Of course, this has been done (for a couple millennium) but they are now applying the standards of TCP/IP (the Internet Protocol) to the data. That is, how do you handle packet loss? (Such as interception by Prairie Falcon). Although, it was meant as a joke, they were able to use it. In one example they sent a 4GB SD card by pigeon in 48 minutes.

Okay, I posted this to my pigeon blog but it was not well received. Confused people asked me what it meant. I found the results of this years race on BBC this morning which state it more plainly:

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Okay, it's got nothing to do with Perl but my racing pigeon buddies don't see the humor in the RFC for TCP/IP using Pigeons so I had to post it here. :-)

Wait - I've got it. This blog is for the Perl Ironman - right? That reminds me - "Ironman" Mike Tyson raises pigeons. [sound of crickets] That's all I've got.

Cheap Books!

Wow! This is pretty neat! Too bad I already own both of those. If you didn't catch it - use Perl; says O'Reilly has dropped the price of Learning Perl and Mastering Perl to $9.99 - before other discounts! I have all of the Learning Perl editions! Some are signed by the Author(s). :-p

So what does this mean? I hope it means a 6th edition of Learning Perl is coming out and not something else (remember "cut-out albums"?).