ISBN:0596001320Amazon.com
In this smooth, carefully paced course, a leading Perl trainer teaches you to program in the language that threatens to make C, sed, awk, and the Unix shell obsolete for many tasks. This book is the "official" guide for both formal (classroom) and informal learning. It is fully accessible to the novice programmer./p>
Reviews From AMAZON.COM
very good book for starting perl
This is excellent book for beginers. Why?
1)The authors are established experts on perl. When I say experts I mean so much so they are famous in the perl community. It is also clear from this book that they have a wealth of other knowledge related to perl (especially linux, design patterns, etc).
2)Randal Schwartz's writing is extremely clear.
3)there are exercises at the end of each chapter. of course, if you want to learn a language to have to use it, not just read it. they do not neglect this important fact (like so many other authors). they give their own expert solutions as well. comparing their solutions with your own further facilates comprehension of teh material.
the only minus is i wish they added a few chapter on OO perl and references!
don't start with the camel and skip the llama. even if you are smart enough, it is faster to learn to walk and then run and to try and run from the start.
sorry for any spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, etc. although i spend hours on this book, i wrote this review in a minute or two.
A great book if you are familiar with coding.
Luckily I am familiar with how to code, and so this book turned out to be a fabulous resource. To be fair, the authors state that you should really have done some sort of programming before or this book will not be as much value to you. But with that pre-requisite covered 'Learning Perl' is a fun and information dense learning tool. Not to say that you can't do it if you have never coded before, but it will be more of a struggle.
Coming in at under 275 pages, the book doesn't waste time in getting down to what you need to know. I am a self-learner, and I was constantly amazed at the end of each chapter at how much we had covered. Given such information rich text, you might imagine it to be a little dry. Not so. The book exhibits a quirky, geeky sense of humor. And be warned; it uses footnotes extensively. While that may not be your bag, I found the footnotes made the book more like an internet browsing experience. You use the footnote like a link to more detailed and in-depth information.
I would give the book 5 stars but for one small beef. The authors assume that you are a UNIX programmer. There are numerous references to UNIX arcana, which you are supposed to just know. Phrases like 'If you want to make a Perl program [..] like the utilities cat, sed, awk, [..] and many others..' mean nothing to me. Furthermore there is little (a couple of paragraphs) to explain how to get Perl up and running on a Windows box. Now, I can easily overlook the little Microsoft digs, but I think more of an effort could have been made to reach out to the 'other side'.
So now, I am building my own Perl library. And I love the functionality it gives me. Once I figured out how to call programs from other web platforms I was one happy camper. All in all the time spent with this book was well worth it. Mainly the book provided a quick and comprehensive introduction to a powerful and flexible language. Thankfully the authors took a difficult subject and made it easier with their light in tone / heavy on the info style. Check it out.