[ra88it]

When I was about 20, I went to the local Barnes and Noble to find a book about programming.

Picked up the O'Reilly Javascript book from around 2000. Had no idea what javascript was, just wanted to learn how to program and trying to pick the most popular language.

$40 later, I got home and started reading! Very confusing, the first half of the book covered the language runtime (I think?) and the second half covered the browser sandbox, and it took me 200 pages to realize that I can't easily read or write to files on my machine with this language. Not what I was hoping for!

Back to Barnes and Noble, another $40 and I came home with the O'Reilly camel book, Beginning Perl I think? Cover to cover read, probably the last time I did that with a programming manual.

Decades have passed, I'm in the same camp as those that prefer Ruby now, but man what a breath of fresh air Perl was back in 2000.

[cutler]

That would be "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall. For me too it was the only programming book of that size I was compelled to read cover to cover. Larry is a great writer but maybe that's to be expected from a linguist. If Python is the number cruncher's favourite language Perl (and subsequently Ruby) must be the linguist's favourite. I got into programming after being intrigued by regular expressions in the advanced section of a chapter on Search And Replace in Dreamweaver 3 Bible back in 2000. At the end of the section there was a footnote to Jeffrey Friedl's "Mastering Regular Expressions" which I read cover to cover. Most of the examples were written in Perl as it was the only language with regex support so deeply baked-in so I had to then go to the source - "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall.

[barrenko]

Ah Ruby, the only OOP without the stink.