Perl course - is it tailored to Linux, or Microsoft Windows?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-06-25 09:25:14 - Graham EllisSharing an answer to a customer enquiry ...
Q: Is the course tailored to Linux operating system?
A: "Yes and no" is probably the best short answer I can give :-/
Perl is an extremely portable language - so your Perl script will run very much the same way if the host operating system is Linux, Windows, or a flavour of Unix. Only when you say "run the following operating system command and save the result into a variable" will you find that code has to be different, and if you're going to use Perl to interface to applications such as Microsoft Excel or Access, then you're going to be dependent on the .dll files supporting Access of Excel, which gives you some dependencies.I'm running a Perl course this week. I'm writing demonstrations / running the course from a Mac (OSX). Delegates have a mixture of Linux and Windows boxes - it's their choice which of our machines (or their own) that they use, and if they're interested in portable scripts, then they can use several machines / transfer files as they wish. All you need on a machine to be able to write and test Perl is really a decent editor and Perl itself, and the course is usually much more productive for delegates if they use the environment they're already familiar with. But - at the delegate's choice - there are occasions when a delegate will use Linux as (s)he's quite new to that, and has to support it rather more in the future. So it's a good learning opportunity on that side too, and a chance to ask me questions as I also do the Linux courses.
That's probably a longer answer that you expected - hopefully it fills you in on what's not a simple answer. Please do let me know if you would like further information, or to book on the next course ;-) ...
Graham
P.S. I have answered the question with regard to the public courses. If we run a private course for you, we can tailor it to be more operating system specific - biasing it to Linux, to Windows, or to OSX. Such private courses are cost effective if you have a group of 4 or more delegates ...