I wouldn't say you need to read a "learn Perl" book first, even. I'd say, if you're interested, dive right in and have a "learn Perl" website handy -- http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/ for example.
Many bugs don't actually require coding. Someone I interviewed said that one of her patches to DW was a single character: the one that limited the names of RSS feeds to 20 chars instead of 25, to leave room for the "_feed". Now, she needed to learn how to find her way round the code, but once she was in there, there was probably a line that read something like $max_feedname_length = 25; or something like that, which hardly requires a deep level of programming to understand :) She changed the 5 to a 0, sent in the patch, and it was accepted.
Many of us don't learn to program formally. We do so by seeing what others have done, and following their examples. When I was about 10 years old I learnt exactly that. My first program read something like:
10 PRINT "HI HI HI I AM THE BEST" 20 GOTO 10
... as did the first programs of almost everyone of my generation. We all learnt it from each other, not from books, though many of us picked up books later.
no subject
Many bugs don't actually require coding. Someone I interviewed said that one of her patches to DW was a single character: the one that limited the names of RSS feeds to 20 chars instead of 25, to leave room for the "_feed". Now, she needed to learn how to find her way round the code, but once she was in there, there was probably a line that read something like $max_feedname_length = 25; or something like that, which hardly requires a deep level of programming to understand :) She changed the 5 to a 0, sent in the patch, and it was accepted.
Many of us don't learn to program formally. We do so by seeing what others have done, and following their examples. When I was about 10 years old I learnt exactly that. My first program read something like:
10 PRINT "HI HI HI I AM THE BEST"
20 GOTO 10
... as did the first programs of almost everyone of my generation. We all learnt it from each other, not from books, though many of us picked up books later.