What are the concepts that must be known by a new Perl developer for searching a job. I mean to say that concept like CGI programming, OO concepts in Perl, use of different module from CPAN, etc.
+9
A:
Perl-related concepts are one category (including regexes, OO, cpan, etc etc); you presumably need to prove mastery of those -- presumably by performing well on tasks of understanding, fixing and extending existing code (that's how I would interview candidates, were I tasked with hiring perl programmers).
The second category is not really related to perl or any other specific language, but has to do with the general technologies needed in the specific job at hand. You mention CGI, and thats surely one possibility in SOME jobs -- but HTTP and related concepts are broader and more widely applicable. E.g., one question I love to ask as an interviewer for ANY web related job is: explain at you favorite level of abstraction what happens when a user types in a browser www.foobar.com and hits enter. This lets me delve into as-deep-as-needed detail on HTTP, TCP, IP, DNS, caching of all kinds, etc, etc.
For a job with no web connection (if there were ANY left;-) I'd focus instead on whatever else the scripts the candidate will produce or maintain if hired are supposed to do -- Linux kernel and sysadm issues, or maybe Windows or BSD or Solaris ones -- or release engineering concepts, version control systems (distributed or otherwise), bioinformatics... whatever! KNOW what the job you're interviewing for actually entails, and be prepared specifically for it: there's NO "one size fits all"!-)
Alex Martelli
2009-09-05 05:48:10
i am working in a small company in india as perl developer. our work is data mining type. what we have to read raw data , parse it and prepare a xml file and then insert it into the database so there is common knowledge requirement for every script we prepare with littlebit diffrence. so for searching another job i must have to learn some new concept in perl .so i was worried beacause we will not get more knowledge of perl
lakhaman
2009-09-05 06:13:10
What's stopping you from "getting more knowledge of Perl"? Go out and learn, on your own.
Ether
2009-09-05 16:21:37
+9
A:
Things I look for when hiring a Perl developer:
- competence with respect to Perl's syntax (knows what the control structures are)
- competence with respect to variables (knows what the variable types are and how they can be used to build complex data structures)
- knowledge of what strict is and why it should be used
- basic understanding of context (void, scalar, and list)
- basic understanding of regexes
- understanding of what CPAN is
- basic understanding of how modules work
Chas. Owens
2009-09-05 05:52:43
+1 Even though it's mentioned on almost every `*tut` page in `perldoc` there are still over 9000 Perl questions on here that would have been fixed under `strict` had they known.
Chris Lutz
2009-09-05 06:01:14
This is a list of minimal criteria for even putting Perl on your resume. Of course, the one's who don't usually put "PERL" instead. ;)
Michael Carman
2009-09-05 13:57:06
@Michael Carman Yep, this is a basic competence check. I figure I can train him or her up from here, but if he or she can't do these things and claims to know Perl, then either he or she is incompetent or a liar. Incompetent people are hard to train because they think they know things they don't and liars aren't worth the time. Now a senior Perl developer position has different requirements.
Chas. Owens
2009-09-05 16:00:00
There are currently less than 2300 questions tagged **`[perl]`** , but I would agree that a significant number of them that would have been improved under strict mode.
Brad Gilbert
2009-09-08 02:04:52
I don't think most Perl questions on Stackoverflow would have been fixed by strict. Very few have to do with mistyped variable names. The strict police regularly overstate that. As Brad says, they would be improved by it, but I disagree that it would solve even a significant number of the questions posted here (and I've read every one of them and edited most of them).
brian d foy
2009-09-16 15:53:56
A:
Of course, the particulars depend on the level of the problem and the problem of the domain. However, we've made a list of the fundamentals in Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl, both of which I would expect from a person who's primary job is as a programmer working with Perl. Those are just the fundamentals. The particular job may require more.
brian d foy
2009-09-07 15:50:54