[Tutor] is it a right choice?

[Kirk Bailey]

payal, I started learning FreeBSD, and began hammering sh/bourne shell scripting into my 
concrete skull (brains of gold, skull of feroconcrete), and I wanted to write some 
scripts. Language of choice appeared to be perl. Tried, bounced. Tried again, bounced. 
Sigh. then I discovered python. And this list.

I took off like wildfire. I kept annoying my other half with the phrase 'this is too 
easy...', and asked a huge number of questions   here, and searched the docs on the site 
like mad.

And I wrote some useful real world software. in 7 weeks. I went from ZERO to working 
list server #1.

I am not bragging. I am using myself as an example of how this language is easy to 
learn, flexible, and powerful. I still find perl a puzzle. But I love my python.

And the snake charmers here are all friendly, and we love Monty Pythonistic humor, and 
never a  bad pun.

So if you are thinking of becoming a snakecharmer, come on in!


Payal Rathod wrote:
> Hi,
> Before I venture in the python infested world, I want to ask whether I
> am making a right choice by taking python as my first programming
> language. I cannot program in C, C++ or Java etc. I can *just* do little
> shell scripting.
> My objective in learning a better language is that I have huge log files
> in my office and get many logs files from friends who are sytem admins.
> I love to analyse those files and find out browing habits of my compnay
> (from squid logs), most number of mails sent to a domain ( like
> hotmail), number of bytes data transferred thru' http, pop3 and smtp
> etc. I prefer to write my own programs to do these things.
> With rudimentary shell scripting knowledge analysing log files which are
> many times over 200Mb is difficult so I was seeking a language which can
> do these tasks beautifully without getting too much involved in
> underlying concepts.
> Am I looking for Python? Is Perl easier to learn for a newbie than
> python? Is it OK to continue with Python?
> 
> Also can Python produce binary programs like perl (perlcc)?
> 
> Thanks,
> With warm regards,
> -Payal
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


-- 

end

Cheers!
         Kirk D Bailey
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