perl training on Windows for perl use on Unix

[John Kittel]

My company wants to hire someone for on-site basic perl language training for some of our application programmers, who will be writing perl for our own in-house use. I already learned it from books and OJT, but they prefer to have a class for themselves. A company they're looking at provides perl training on a Windows system. But after the class we'll be using it on our Unix systems. It doesn't sound like a good idea to me, but what do you think? Is there a reasonable chance that a 3-5 day Windows based introduction to perl class would be useful for people who will be using perl on Unix?

- John

[James R. Ferguson]

John:

Why not? Perl runs on a plethora of platforms. While there are things that are indigenous to UNIX platforms, there are a great number of common problems, techniques and methods to be discussed, taught and learned.

Different people have different modes in which they learn best. I'd look at the opportunity to sharpen your own skills further.

Regards!

...JRF...

[A. Clay Stephenson]

If you were running in a mixed Windows, Linux, and UNIX environment, I'd say okay but given that you will be running on UNIX, I'm less than convinced.

There are things that work in UNIX than simply don't exist in Windows -- for example, alarm(). The alarm function when coupled with signal handlers allow you to write code that times out if not completed within a certain period of time.

Whenever possible, I write Perl that is platform independent but there are very useful modules that are UNIX specific.

It's very easy to migrate to Windows but the migration in the other direction is more difficult. Perl is so intimately tied to the underlying system calls and libc functions that you are really missing the boat in trying to teach Perl on Windows.

I would keep looking or pitch the idea that you should teach the course yourself because, if done correctly, you will teach Perl and UNIX simultaneously as opposed to teaching Perl on UNIX. Moreover, regular expressions are much more UNIX than Windows and it gives you an opportunity to point out differences between "regular" regular expressions and Perl's RE's on steriods.

If you ever want to deploy onWindows, this O'reilly book will do the trick:
"Learning Perl on Win32 Systems".

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi John,

Yes, It is quite possible. Active state Perl in Windows is more stabilised and portable too. You can easily migrate to Unix once you are comfortable with perl.

http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/?mp=1

-Arun

[Muthukumar_5]

I hope it is not a problem to handle perl scripts in windows. May be file system changes and file usage changes. 3-5 day is enough to reach expert level if you are know with unix platform.

--
Muthu

[Patrice Le Guyader]

Hello John,

What you can do is to install on your windows plateform windows services for Unix also know as SFU. With this you have perl and you can ever do shell scripting at home and run it on unix as long as you don't use hpux dedicated commands(ioscan,...). Once installed you can open a shell windows as you're able to have a dos one.
It's part of windows 2003 ressource kit know.

Some links :
introduction to SFU :
http://www.dnjonline.com/article.aspx?ID=dec04_sfu
Homepage :
http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/default.aspx
Download link :
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=896c9688-601b-44f1-81a4-02878ff11778&DisplayLang=en

Regards
Pat

[John Kittel]

Thanks everyone. I will consider these answers.

- John