Reddit mentions of Perl Black Book, 2nd Edition

Nah, don't fret it. We all started somewhere. :)

Back in the day, I was grasping for anything I could get my hands on. From memory, a couple of the earlier books that I recall spending a chunk of time with, the titles were something like (I apologize that I don't have the exact correct titles):

• Top 50 UNIX Commands (spiral bound, lay-flat)
  
• KSH Reference Manual
  
  This was like circa 1989. Of these two books, I probably got most of the way through the former, and maybe 10-20% of the way through the latter. Spent a chunk of time learning my way through vi as well.
  
  One company I was at around that time, I remember writing at least one custom script which would call itself with different args. If called without args, it would follow an initialization sequence, otherwise it would do some other stuff, depending on what was passed. It was probably an unnecessary approach, but I'd recently learned about that approach, so that's what I did.
  
  Around 1988, I got some exposure to SCO Xenix, so I spent my free time perusing the Permuted Index.
  
  Another source that I found useful for quite some time, was to pick up whatever UNIX magazine caught my interest at the local magazine rack, eg, UNIX Review was one. Didn't understand much at the time, but I was able to gradually osmote what I needed. The columns which focused on this or that I found to be particularly informative.
  
  Book learning is good, but I tended to lose interest with the contrived examples. I found I learned better when I had a real-world problem to solve (something not terribly difficult, but one which I couldn't solve using the language I wanted to learn). That's when I would pick up the book and dig through for useful examples and code snippets.
  
  Somewhat orthogonal (and this might lead to some controversy), you might want to tinker with Perl. Only as an alternative to bash, is all. Some love Perl, some hate it. I used to like it, but I would rather code in Python or Ruby these days.
  
  That said, you might find this to be a good reference for Perl: http://www.amazon.com/Perl-Black-Book-2nd-Edition/dp/1588801934/
  
  I happened upon the older edition some years back. It was being sold for really cheap (something like $6). It's a really hefty book, one which is chock full of examples. The style is interesting, as well, where someone comes to our hapless author with a challenge to solve, and how the author goes about solving it. Subsequent challenges build on existing knowledge. You can jump to a specific section if something in particular interests you.
  
  Likewise, I've got the Python Phrasebook, which is considerably smaller (and more terse) than Perl Black Book. Even so, I'll pull out this handy reference for snippets of useful Python from time to time.