I’ve got a job coming up where I’ll be writing a bunch of Perl. I had a look at the response of the web server I’ll be running on and found that it’s running mod_perl. Ooh I thought, I’ll go and have a look at that and see what it looks like.

What I found is a tutorial that tells you at great length that you will fall on your arse if you dare to use closures, or destructive subroutines in any way.

Duh!

Closures are interesting, I never really use them. Destructive functions however: that way leads pain. Welcome to the functional age, coders! By functional, I don’t just refer to Lisp et al, I mean any code where a function is a black box.

Anyway, I just want to know how to write mod_perl programs that make pages. A great long page that tells me about the traps isn’t actually very much use unless I’m in one. This is often a problem with educators. They know the gotchas are more important, but they assume that their students have a large capacity to remember a block of knowledge that doesn’t relate to anything else yet.

Once I’ve written and run my first mod_perl script, I’ll have a reference point. Then I will appreciate this advanced knowledge. But until it has something to link to, it’s just a discussion on the nature of Perl, and therefore not what I need at all.

And I signed up for an exam to become a Sun certified J2SE programmer.