>I agree with everything you said and would like to make it more succinctly: We need to figure out a way to make what CPAN authors write relevant for newbies.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if this is going to help all that much at this point. I think the main group of people that use the current, rather poor tutorials are newbie(or even experienced) developers that have inherited Perl code that uses the language in a way that they have never encountered before. Those devs need a good way to find all the insane single character typing optimizations built into the language.
If you have a script that consists of one 1500 character line with approximately 10 alphanumeric characters total, well written Perl examples aren't going to help you figure it out that much.
Sure, it will help if you're a complete newbie to Perl, and learning it from scratch. For those people, drilling good coding standards into them from day 1 is a GREAT thing, if for no other reason than to avoid the spaghetti that plagues a lot of Perl.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if this is going to help all that much at this point. I think the main group of people that use the current, rather poor tutorials are newbie(or even experienced) developers that have inherited Perl code that uses the language in a way that they have never encountered before. Those devs need a good way to find all the insane single character typing optimizations built into the language.
If you have a script that consists of one 1500 character line with approximately 10 alphanumeric characters total, well written Perl examples aren't going to help you figure it out that much.
Sure, it will help if you're a complete newbie to Perl, and learning it from scratch. For those people, drilling good coding standards into them from day 1 is a GREAT thing, if for no other reason than to avoid the spaghetti that plagues a lot of Perl.