Dan gave me a pink camel

jdavidb on 2007-07-12T14:53:07

An old boss who works in my building is getting rid of a lot of his old books, and he just gave me a 1st edition Programming perl! I'm ecstatic because I've always intended to get one of these from my library because:

• It's the book I first learned Perl from: sentimental reasons
• I got a real kick out of the Job examples in the book. Who could forget open PRINTER, ">/dev/ctp"; to open the clay tablet printer device?
• I remember it as looking like a simple and effective text to learn programming in general from, not just Perl. My kids may learn from portions of this book some day.

Interestingly enough, I seem to recall that when our little group realized we had outgrown Perl 4 (which happened far later than it should have), this same boss, at the time a coworker in a another group, was the man who loaned us our first 2nd edition Camel.

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Ahh, the memories...

merlyn on 2007-07-15T00:37:48

Although I had written a shelf-full of books for other companies, that camel was the first time I could pick up a book with my name on the cover. What joy.

It was really great to work with Larry on that book... our humor styles were similar enough that when we got to the glossary, and I stubbed in a few dummy terms (Regular Expression: /Oh s.*t./) just to keep things moving, Larry and I quickly agreed that we could do some of the terms as a joke, other terms seriously, and a few somewhat ambiguously.

It's hard to believe that this was all done about 17 years ago. Geez, I'm getting old.

And I certainly couldn't have predicted that having written that book, I was then asked to write a training course, which inspired the Llama book, which (thanks to good timing) became the basis for most of Stonehenge's activities in the late 90s. What a wild ride it has been.

Re:Ahh, the memories...

jdavidb on 2007-07-15T18:12:51

Thanks for the book, the humor, and the community. :)