Do note though, "Learning Perl" is really a very basic approach. If you've dabbled with C or another language before, I doubt you'll find this book much help. "Programming Perl" on the other hand offers a good insight into the perl builtin functions and more, although I did find it more like a manpage-in-a-book. One book I haven't got, but which is supposedly a great "How do I..." resource is the "Perl Cookbook". Your choice really, there is a lot of variety. You might be able to get away with some web tutorials, but at the time I was searching I didn't find anything too amazing.

Once I'd got the basics of perl, I started work on a perl version of my archaic mess of Visual BASIC and mIRC bot (with DDE yuckiness), bitchbot. Yes, that's right. Bitchbot started off as Win32 only with a VB.EXE controlling a separate mIRC via DDE. What a horrible mess it was. Within a week or two I'd got a perl port of the basic core of bitchbot running, and the rest is history.

Soon afterwards I took control of the Gloom Map Depository as it was spiralling into chaos with people leaving and the site in risk of closing down. One of the things I wanted to do was consolidate the map reviews to a CGI script to allow for more features and consistency. As it happened, a few weeks into starting the project, we were told to think of something for an 'A' Level Computing project. I asked if what I was doing with the GMD Review Script was acceptable, and it was. One of the more "unique" projects for sure :). So now I had a deadline and needed to make a working app. with documentation all the way along, plus a user manual at the end. The final result was the GMD Review Script as it is today. With thanks to Gumby, impact and all the other monkeys who helped convert the existing reviews into the new script format, the script now makes it extremely easy to post new reviews to the GMD via a web based interface and offers much improved user control and security.

I then saw quite a bit of demand for PHP skills and set about learning that. See my PHP page for more details on the history of me and PHP and some of the stuff I've done with it.

My next perl project was to be R1CHboard. Initially I intended R1CHboard to be a simple flat file forum system for the GMD, and in theory that's what it turned into. However I found it increasingly difficult to code some things due to the inflexibility of flat files, so I stopped work on this version and instead turned to using the DBI module and storing everything in a mySQL database. This proved to be easier to maintain, but the script was extremely slow connecting and setting up queries etc, so I stopped work on that too. However, there was light at the end of the tunnel in the form of mod_fastcgi. This clever little perl and apache module provides persistent scripts, ie instead of exiting after being accessed, the program continues to run. With a little recoding, I tested a new version of the mysql-R1CHboard. Less than 10ms for all page generation times was rather good, and I am continuing development of this fastcgi / mySQL version of R1CHboard (albeit rather slowly...). Visit the R1CHboard page for news and more info on R1CHboard.

Today my latest perl project happens to be this site you're viewing right now. You may not have noticed, but all the pages on r1ch.net (with the exception of the /old/ content) are dynamically generated with a few funky perl CGI scripts to allow maximum flexibility and consistency throughout the site. I have done many more other smaller perl projects that haven't found there way out on to the net much such as an IRC bot to query planetarion database files, a very old counter script that has now thankfully been deleted, and many other small apps to do a specific function and have since been "lost" along the way somewhere.