Matthew's Journal

I have concluded that I really ought to learn some Perl. In my experience, while reading the fine manual is a good start, having some sort of project in a new language is the way to really cement my learning.

I have also been thinking for a while that it might be nice to have some record of beers I have drunk. Partly so I can avoid the real stinkers, and partly so that when faced with a beer festival list, I can try and pick new beers. And also because I'm a bit of a sad geek.

Things to note about a beer would be: name, brewery, abv, rating (I am persuaded by Ben that /5 is the way to go here, rather than the /10 I've used in the past), comment, and maybe date and occasion of tasting and country of origin? I guess you might want the opportunity to add repeat tastings in the event of changing one's mind substantially.

Obvious features would be: interactive or bulk import, various search and sort routines for output (cli and maybe web-based too?), and the ability to feed in a beer list (from e.g. a festival) and get back new beers, and perhaps beers I've liked a lot previously.

Less obvious features would be: tweeting new beers as they are added to the system, links to Open Beer DB, beermad, Cyclops, etc., export in odd formats...?

I don't think there's much of great difficulty in implementation - some sort of SQLish storage should get most of the searching and sorting pretty much for free, and the rest is just some text processing (with a bit of thought about reliable updates, future spec changes and the like). What have I missed?

I'm sure this is a wheel that has been invented before, but maybe someone else will want to use it :)

And finally, now would be a good time to pass on any pearls of wisdom that you wish someone had imparted to you when you started to write Perl ;-)