The tester I am working with is a real Perl enthusiast and has a lot of scripts all set to unleash on the latest project we will be testing. As I am trying to learn all his testing experience then I thought it best that I start to learn Perl so that I have some chance of understanding what his scripts are doing and how they do it.
So Perl was downloaded along with some tutorials.
Didn't take long before I was saying Hello to the World and then counting how many lines were in a file and then writing the lines to another file with a slight modification to them.
Simple stuff but I'm starting to realise how powerful and useful Perl is going to be - generating test data, checking output files, parsing through log files...
And that's just the basics - all sorts of automation possibilties and recording and and and...
It did seem strange at first writing Perl after many years of VB programming. Just a simple text editor, remembering to end a line with a ";" and running the script through a DOS box.
But it felt good to be learning a new language again and starting to feel in control of the machine and what was happening.
One day after starting to learn Perl I have a script that connects to the Net and stores the response from a web page into a file
I'm already getting bored of the Perl puns though so was able to resist using one for the title of the blog.
