Thursday, January 1, 2009

A little bit about me (and you?)

First, Happy New Year 2009!

My name is Damien and I live in France.
I share a small appartment at the feet of the Alps with 3 beautiful girls: my daughters and their mother (who, by a funny coincidence, also happens to be my wife).

I have been an embedded system engineer since 2000 and have worked for 2 companies:
- an American firm specialized in payment systems in Atlanta, GA then Philadelphia, PA
- a European microelectronics company in Grenoble, France

I have mainly programmed in C on embedded systems (8-bit 8051 for smart card applications and 32-bit SH4 for video decoder system-on-chips).
My career is moving towards testing/quality assurance. In order to automate testing tools, I have undertaken the learning of the Perl scripting language.
I have had three days of Perl beginner's class and have purchased the "Programming Perl" O'Reilly book by Lary Wall (father of Perl), Tom Christiansen and Jon Orwant. It is also referred to as the "Camel book" because of the front cover (although it is really a dromedary, which goes to show that Perl programmers are not natural science buffs). Here it is in all its splendor:

The Perl Camel bookAnd here are a few reviews:
Check it out if you have a chance. This is the ultimate reference book on Perl (co-author Tom Christiansen is in charge of the Perl documentation). The "Learning Perl" book may be better suited to learning the language but I don't have it at home. We'll just have to dig through the Camel book and look for help on the web.

How about your background? What is your goal for learning Perl? Are you starting/writing a blog also?

French words of the day:
- "un chameau": a camel (two lumps)
- "un dromadaire": a dromedary (one lump)

Next posts:
  • Learning how to run a blog
  • How to get Perl and set up your environment (Windows and Linux)?
  • Hello World program
  • Search Engine Optimization for your blog

5 comments :

  1. Marie ReedJanuary 1, 2009 at 5:20 PM

    Your writing style is quite engaging! Learning Perl with you would be quite an adventure:)It's very clever to teach French words too!

    ReplyDelete
  2. DamienJanuary 1, 2009 at 5:55 PM

    Wow, I can only wish that all my readers are only half as nice as you are Marie.
    Thanks for the comment and I hope you'll start sharing your Perl scripts soon ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sharath ByregowdaApril 16, 2010 at 8:03 AM

    Damien,

    I am a software tester with no experience in coding. I was looking for a blog which could share the experience of learning Perl and I came across your blog. I have read only this post till now and Ia m very inspired by your writing. I have previously attempted to learn Perl on my own reading thru online articles but have lost interest after some time. I hope to actively participate in this blog and learn from you a lot.

    Cheers
    Sharath.B
    http://testtotester.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  4. DamienApril 23, 2010 at 9:27 PM

    Welcome Sharath! I am looking forward to your contribution.
    However, there seems to be a little problem with your blog's URL. My antivirus detects a malware when accessing it :(

    ReplyDelete
  5. CurroAugust 25, 2011 at 1:23 PM

    Hello Damien.

    I need to learn a language to make system scripts in Windows and Linux servers. I found your blog and it is wonderfull for me. I'm going to read you from start.

    Gratz about your blog.

    ReplyDelete

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