And one of the most embarrassing problems I've found at client sites is when some of their key engineers on a troubled project really don't know Perl.

(You may balk and exclaim that this is impossible because Perl scripts are the bread and butter of chip design, but that's what makes this problem so embarrassing.) Like a doctor treating a famous patient, one has to treat this problem very discreetly-which means I give those clients my sequential list of recommended reading so they can quickly and quietly learn Perl at home.

First off, I recommend Perl For Dummies by Hoffman. Start on page 30 near the end of chapter 2 (the Perl command line), and from there read closely up to page 146 to understand the basics of loops, strings, lists, operators and the print command.

Then jump to chapters 11 and 12 on file I/O and then later focus on the pattern-matching and regular expressions discussion in chapter 13. Ignore the remaining 14 chapters of this book because most chip designers won't be dabbling in XML, Java, databases, HTML, object-oriented programming, associative arrays, nor downloading fancy CPAN packages, just to clean up some PhysOpt DEF output for Silicon Ensemble to read.

Next, snag a copy of Learning Perl by Schwartz. It'll be a quick 175-page read mostly covering material you learned in that first book-but it'll be presented in a different way to reinforce the subject matter.

Here again you want to focus on regular expressions and pattern matching in chapter 7. Perl's greedy matching is its biggest strength, but it's also the most obtuse part of the language. It's here where you'll get your first insights into those occult regex incantations that the Unix man pages so often reference. (For more advanced regex, I recommend Mastering Regular Expressions by Friedl, but be warned that it's ugly. You should also be warned about the Perl Cookbook by Christiansen. He likes to drift off into Unix arcanum a bit too much for practical use, but on occasion he can help.)

And to finish off this self-taught course, I close with the best book from the "monkey see, monkey do" school of learning: Quigley's Perl By Example.

It's 850 pages of examples with step-by-step explanations that the rest of us mere mortals can understand. Happy scripting.

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a Contract ASIC Designer, and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@theworld.com or (508) 429-4357.