perl

This book was the required and only text for an introductory Perl class that I took. The students generally panned the book. While we appreciated having an extensive source of examples (the book is over 800 pages long), the examples often seemed trivial and repetitive.

Let's look at what the book is not. This book is not an introductory programming book-it does not cover basic principles of programming. This book is not a Perl tutorial-it does not introduce Perl concepts and features in a systematic and integrated way. For example, consider the various array functions. All you get in the book is a series of separate sections on each function. There is no discussion that push and pop might somehow be related. This book is not a Perl reference-it does not provide complete and easy-to-access information. For example, it only rarely covers exception conditions. Consider the pop function-the book never indicates what happens if you apply the pop function to an empty array.

So what is this book? It is an extensive source of trivial and repetitive examples. This book might be a good supplementary text for people who learn best through numerous repetitive examples. Also, the systematic three-part layout of each example is helpful (the format of the Perl language element, an example script with output, and an explanation).

If you want a book of Perl examples, you might consider the "Perl Cookbook" by Christiansen and Torkington.

I'm using this book in a class and, while it's fairly solid, I've found a lot of it to be repetitive and lengthier than it needs to be. The O'Reilly "Learning Perl" book is probably a better place to start, although it's helpful to have a bit of UNIX under your belt before tackling that one (come to think of it, you should probably know a bit about UNIX before tackling Perl, regardless of what book you're using).

As a programmer experienced with Java and C, I needed to learn PERL for a new project. I started out with this book and I'm finding it acceptable, but not great. It certainly has enough examples, but the actual presentation of the language was lacking. It relies far too heavily on examples for me, and reading through hundreds of examples has turned out to be a frustrating and difficult way to learn. I think I'm going to try a different book and hope for something better.