worst advice for starting programmers

do you have common knowledge of programing? or are you starting from square one?

If you have a understanding of structuring a language then go ahead and jump into something like Visual Basic or C++, depending if you want to program object oriented or not...

but if you have no knowledge, start with something easy like Pascal, just to learn how to structure things...

Alex broke it down pretty well...

>>32

Different kind of magic number.

In this context it means some non-obvious constant whose value is significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line (hard-coded).

1 and 0 aren't as their use is usually very obvious. True/False, an increementor and so on.

In your context it is a magic number for perl, because perl lacks a no-op operator. Their use in perl should be obvious for people who know shit about perl.