I have lived in the rat race that is London for 11 years now. It feels a long time. My wife and myself feel that it is now long enough. So we have pondered the idea of moving to Cambridge. Both of us love the city. It is so much smaller, with plenty of green open space. My wife love’s it because of its cycle friendly nature (she is Dutch after all). We have two small children. So somewhere like Cambridge would be a great place for them to grow up. Hopefully if we are lucky we can get a house with a garden for them to play in and enjoy.
My problem is that I don’t want to just go and get any job in Cambridge. I want to work for a company that I really like. Either based in or around Cambridge or home based.
The place that would really like to work for is a little known company that is responsible for a certain open source operating system. The company in question is Canonical.
So far I have applied for two different jobs, but I have not heard anything back at all. I know that they probably only want the highest calibre of people to work for them. Personally I feel that I do fit in this category. I guess it is just a matter of getting their attention and proving it. This just feels a bit tricky in the time scales that we have set ourselves. If only they would give me some feedback.
What can I do? Just keep applying to Canonical or look for something else instead? It is very difficult. I feel torn. I want to work for Canonical, but I don’t know how long I will have to wait. 
In summary buy this book if you want to learn Perl. Simply put, this is the best book I have ever found to teach you Perl. I first read a version of this book in 1999. It was a good book then, that has matured and gotten even better over time.
This book covers everything that you need to know to get you started with Perl. Perl isn’t the easiest language to learn, but this book explains everything as simply as possible. Even the chapter on regular expressions.
This particular edition covers Perl 5.10, which has now been replaced by Perl 5.12 (This book was written 2 years ago). That doesn’t really matter as this won’t impact on you. Perl 5.12 is mostly a bug fix release, which adds few new features.
One of Perl’s strengths is CPAN (Perl’s on-line module library). The book does have a chapter dedicated to it, but it only covers a handful of modules. I would have expected the book to cover a few more of the more common ones. This may just be me being a little picky.
The last chapter of this book is really useful. It is called “Beyond the Llama”, and gives you all sorts of information about where to go to learn more. This book is just the beginning…
Please note: I did receive a free copy of this book via the O’Reilly Blogger review programme.
I recently found a few Perl quotes that I particularly like. I thought I would share them with you too. I hope you like them.
“Perl: The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption.”
– Keith Bostic
“PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.”
– Jon Ribbens
“Python is basically executable pseudocode, and if that’s the case, then Perl is executable line noise.”
- Randall Munroe
There are more programming related quotes
here.
