Perl or C++?

[ric-o]

I would recommend both but start with C++ as most suggested here. I have notcied that most exploits posted are in C.

I know Perl pretty well and will comment on the power of it that I have discovered...

Perl is great for the following:
[list=a][*]Great for LAN and system administrative tasks[*]Working with text files: logs, reports, etc[*]Has great regular expression searching[/list=a]

SAMS has a learn perl in 21 days book which is descent beginner book. O'Reilly has some good intermediate Perl books.

Hope this helps, enjoy!

[KidAdmin]

Originally posted here by the_JinX
java, php, perl and c++ have a lot of stuff similar to C ( dare I say stuff that originated in C )

so why not go for C first...

A lot of (mostly young) people say why first learn C and not just start with C++...
Well somewhere allong the road you will see (proppably) that starting with C you could have avoided a lot of stupid mistakes you made with your C++ !!

The advantage to NOT doing this (learning c before c++) is object oriented. If one were to learn to program Object Oriented first, then they wouldnt have to convert themselves later in the long run. The advantage to programing OO far outways the mistakes one would make in c++ by not learning c first).

[|The|Specialist]

Actually there are some major differences between C VC++ C++... yeah they are the same in some ways but you get commands & tools that normally wouldn't be available.

VC++ is the visual drag and drop stuff

Meanwhile C++ would sometimes be like a freebie & mainly console based compiler.

Originally posted here by ric-o
SAMS has a learn perl in 21 days book which is descent beginner book. O'Reilly has some good intermediate Perl books.

Sams books are ok but I usually stay away from those "teach yourself" stuff... Personally I hate sams teach yourself books... the name says it all "teach yourself" meanwhile the book itself is useless and at times very confuseing or just downright boreing. I once saw a sams teach yourself book about "HTML" yet the entire book actually had nothing to do with actually learning HTML and had nearly 500 pages on how to point and click stuff in frontpage. And have you ever read sams teach yourself C++?? Yuck, I hated it... They often have a bad habbit of over explianing things to the so called noobie then tottaly confuseing the more advanced peaple with odd and over the top code and thick and disorganized pages.

[Nitro]

I am personally partial to C. C is just at the right level of abstraction for me (low-level), whereas C++ is a bit too abstract. I'm definitely not saying that C++ is the devil, because I love it. I'm also saying that C is alot easier to learn than C++ as C isn't as big of a language as C++. I began with C++, and thought it was a great language for a beginner. After awhile I moved to learning C, which I thought was incredible because of how low-level it was compared to C++. People will also say that C++ is as fast as C, which I'm sure if programmed by a C++ expert it would be. However, I have done a simple timing test for C and C++ console output functions that proves C is faster than C++ in the sense of those two functions, which does not necessarily determine the overall speed of the two languages. I'm basically saying that I tested two different output functions (puts() and cout), and the C function puts() left cout in the dust. This does NOT mean, however, that all C code is faster than C++, I'm simply stating my findings from one test with two functions.


EDIT: And VC++ is NOT drag and drop. It is a fully featured software development environment.

-noix-

[|The|Specialist]

Originally posted here by Nitro
EDIT: And VC++ is NOT drag and drop. It is a fully featured software development environment.

You both mistaken then corrected yourself... good for you. And yes it is fully featured with wizards that produce mass amounts of utter bullshit you'll probably never use and tools that let you drop and drag or sometimes even point and click what you'd normally need to code in by yourself.

Also C would be very close but more of mid-way upper/lower level third generation programing language where as the fourth generation programming language would be like C++, ADA, Pascal, Visual Basic, Visual C++, & (ect)

Meanwhile the really true low level stuff would be more like assembly & binary... the stuff that litterally made all of this possable.

[breakology]

There is a big difference between the applications of PERL and C++. PERL is more of a scripting language, extremly useful for CGI scripts and LAN admin tasks. It's not really something I would recomend for a first langauge. C++ is a object oriented compiled language which while VERY powerful, can be mind bending for beginners, especially with all the low level memory managment functions of C++. If you are looking for a first language give JAVA a look, or maybe even PYTHON.