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Old 23rd December 2008
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TerryP TerryP is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: USofA
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If you're used to using a unix shell, learning shell scripting is a very good idea; especially when you find yourself entering mini shell scripts into your shell prompt, rather then abusing history / line editing features lol.


In my personal opinion there is a great difference between learning programming, and learning a programming language. One is an art form, the other is just a canvas. I would also recommend reading this article sometime.


Interpreted languages make a lot of things easier -> /bin/sh, Ruby, and Python are all good choices. In my experience, Pythons docs are boring as horse-crap if you're not used to the lingo, but is very handy when solving problems. Ruby is on par with Python and is a very easy language to learn (~couple hours), but the overall documentation lacks in some spots when placed along side other languages (Python, Perl, Java, C, C++). The bourne shell (sh) and related ones (bash/ksh), are about as simple as it gets;but one needs to b/p to think outside the box often, in order to manipulate data at times.


If you use an editor like Vim or Emacs, that has their own internal scripting language; you might try utilizing it (vimscript/elisp) to do odds an ends.
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Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''.
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