AugieDB

For a senior developer, $150,000 is about right. I'm looking at the latest half dozen jobs I've seen on LinkedIn for open senior developer positions and they all start at that number, and range up to $185k to $200k. Digging a little deeper, I see some th atstart well above that number, but it's for the huge companies you're thinking of -- Google, Netflix, Github.

Looks like something Launchpad McQuack would fly. Actually, it kind of looks like Launchpad....

Yeah, but Hockridge and Bell did an amazing job with Asterix. It's still hilarious in English.

Sadly, they're not popular in the U.S., but I love them. I switched my comics reading habit after nearly 30 years to European comics and haven't looked back. I prefer Asterix over Tintin, but I think reading Tintin with some of the historical background in mind might help. One of these days...

For anyone in North America looking for European comics to read, I review them at PipelineComics.com - there's something in European comics for everyone, from humor to action to drama and everything else.

And the series is still going -- the latest book in the series just came out last year. Cinebook is publishing English translations of the series, too.

Wow, that brought me back, thanks. My final project in my college computer graphics course was a Boulder Dash clone from the version I had on my Commodore 64 growing up. I brought in the C=64 to compare and contrast the two versions. Wrote a level editor and everything. It's still a fun puzzle game.

I loved this episode when I first heard it, but reading your recap of it reminds me of a similar story from my college days. I had a CompSci professor who had worked at Bell Labs, which was all of 10 minutes down the street from the college. I remember he was having problems with printing something in the computer lab one week, so he wrote a driver for the printer over the weekend. This would have been about 1997 or so. And he talked about it like it was nothing, the simplest thing in the world.

It looks like my professor was just taking after the people he worked with. For that level of programmer, writing new drivers for hardware was a weekend project.

One of our CompSci textbooks was written by that same professor -- I just took it down off the shelf and looked at the intro. Brian K. was thanked for being an early reader of "several revisions."

In retrospect, it's really cool to have been only a couple degrees away from that kind of history -- and I probably didn't quite realize how awesome that was back then.

That was a shrewd marketing move by a developer to get his app blocked by Apple so he could make hay on it. Unfortunately, it paid off. The app shot up the charts after they manufactured that controversy for all the free publicity.

"Programming Perl" was the first computer "textbook" I ever read with a sense of humor. Before that, it had been all dry C books and the like. That's why I liked it so much. Yes, "Learning Perl" would definitely be better. At the time, I wanted both the tutorial AND the reference book, so that's what I got.

"Intermediate Perl" is still awesome for the next level stuff, particularly with all the references and transformations, et. al.

Dancer2 is also great for creating a web service, of sorts. Need something to send out JSON chunks with a URL front-end? Very simple to set up and get going. I've been translating some code I wrote for web pages into little engines for Dancer2 to run for other groups inside the company to extract information out for their own applications. It's perfect for that.

Was introduced to Perl in a programming languages course in college in 1996/1997. Brought it to my first job, where it gained fame there for being the language that took a 12 hour process and ran it in less than a minute. (They had originally been trying to parse a huge log file with Visual Basic, I believe it was. Perl was made for, well, extraction and reporting...)

Been programming in it full time ever since.

Thanks, Larry Wall, Randall Schwartz, Brian Foy, Nat Torkington, Tom Christiansen, Damian Conway, etc. etc.

Count me in as another person introduced to O'Reilly via "Programming Perl." Was "Perl Best Practices" the first such "Best Practices" book?