Ask Trish

O'Reilly School of Technology Guidance Counselor Trish Gray answers your questions about your I.T. Career goals and how to reach them.

About the Author
In addition to helping students and I.T. professionals for 13 years, Tricia Mills Gray has been the Senior Development Manager of OST since it's inception as UserActive in 1997. She was the 2002 SBA Midwest Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and is currently writing the OST PHP/SQL Series. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois College of Engineering.

So Many Perl Choices, So Little Time

Dear Trish:
My name is Derek, and I have been a Unix Administrator now for 7.5 years on AIX, HPUX and Sun platforms. I graduated from a 4 year University on Ohio in CIS and Communications. During that time I interned at a bank doing Unix support. Ever since school I have always had a desire to get into programming and so I taught myself Perl and Perl CGI. During my career I have written many Perl scripts and a few programs using CGI for our Operations staff to login, view tape pools, monitor tape pools and import tapes into tape pools.

I am now seriously desiring to make the switch over as a Perl programmer, but I have no Java/JavaScript/DHTML/AJAX knowledge or real work experience. I am currently working with a local recruiter to find that Perl/Java career, but do you think taking these online classes JavaScript, CGI with Perl, SQL Databasing, Intro to XML, HTML and CSS and OO using Java, will help me land that desired career? Do you have any other advice?

Thank you,
Derek from Columbus, OH

Dear Derek:
Thanks for contacting me. Yes, generally speaking, programming jobs require skills in several technologies, since software ventures tend to consist of a framework (ie. LAMP or .NET) rather than just one programming language.

However, which technologies you choose to supplement Perl depends on what you want to do with it. It appears that you're already doing a lot of CGI and web- based work, so you're already on your way to web programming positions in open source. But do you want to program more heavily on the front-end, back-end, or the system itself?

In both the front-end (ie. user interfaces) and the back-end (ie. database programming), you'll need to know HTML and CSS so that you can output properly to the web. So this is a good course to start with.

After that, if you want to continue your back-end work, I would suggest either the six-course Web Programming Certificate or the five-course Open Source Certificate series. These give you a good working skillset in several technologies as a springboard into web programming.

If you would rather do front-end user interfaces like Google Maps, you will want to supplement your Perl programming with JavaScript, JavaScript DOM and AJAX. This is taken care of in our new three-course Client Side Web Programming Certificate, released just this month.

And if you'd rather do system programming, to automate system administration tasks, you'll want to learn Sed and Awk, which is covered with system-based Perl in Linux/Unix 4.

Each course should take you approximately 40 hours to complete, so you can gain working skills in a short amount of time. Plus with your lab account that persists beyond coursework, you'll be able to build your online portfolio to list on your resume as a URL.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to let me know.

Thanks,
Trish

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