Learning Perl

Beginner friendly to a fault, but still useful if you have some prior knowledge.Clearly written with TIMTOWTDI in mind as it teaches the language very well, but leaves it up to the reader to figure out their own style.A beginner would benefit from also reading up on best practices.

I am a computer professional, but not a programmer. I took a C++ course in college, 10 years ago, and in the last couple years I have taken up Bash scripting. I figured I could probably do more if I learned a real language, instead of just playing with Bash.This book did not disappoint. It's been excellent. It takes a very practical approach to educating the reader on the mechanics of Perl, focusing on cumulative knowledge as the chapters move along. The text is reasonably engaging, and the material moves at a good pace - not too fast and not too slow. The exercises at the end of the chapters help reinforce the material, and even includes estimates of how long the programming should take. It clearly articulates differences between Perl versions without droning on incessantly about tiny nuances. It is riddled with footnotes for more advanced users to help them understand more and more exceptions to basic rules, as they are initially taught by the text.To be clear, this book isn't a book that teaches how to program. If you're looking for something that covers procedural logic, this is not the book for you. However, I would suspect that even someone without a deep computer background, but just a strong willingness to learn, would find this book beneficial.If you ARE a programmer, you might find it a bit novice, and the pace a little slow - maybe not though, maybe you should just absorb the material faster and fly through the chapters. It's hard for me to say.It was exactly what I was looking for, and after some more practice, I believe I may be moving on to  Intermediate Perl .

This book is a fair introduction to the world of Perl and the depths of the dark twisted psyche that is the mind of Larry Wall. (As an aside, I have never before touched a programming language that has been as willfully perverse as Perl, but that is by design and surprisingly works to make the experienced coder's life easier). It is a decent starting point, although it is a bit too verbose at times. In my mind, the biggest flaw of this book is that the code examples lack explicit blocks listing the output for given code snippets and a lack of how variables have actually been defined. There are also cases where the authors decided to be cute instead of clear - the most recent example I stumbled upon was a string labeled as a "Coke\tSprite" producing a Coke, a Tab and a Sprite. While this is good for a snigger, I'm not sure it's worth the extra mental effort required to process it. There are more concise introductions online, but this does not make a bad starting point, especially if you have little prior programming experience. The exercises provided are very helpful to start developing a feeling of progress in learning the language.

It's no wonder this book is a classic and listed in almost every resource I've seen online as the go to book for learning Perl from the beginning. The book is well laid out, very well detailed without being overly complicated and cryptic, and covers enough material to really get going on most simple, but effective, perl scripts. The authors' over use of the Flintstones is a bit annoying and unnecessary. Nevertheless, the concepts are clearly described and laid out and then nicely reinforced by a few exercises at the end of each chapter. My only complaint in that regard is that I would have liked to see more exercises that I could use to sharpen my teeth included. Despite that, though, I think the book is a perfect start for anyone looking to learn the structure and utility of perl programming, and gives a very nice foundation that one can use to go further into the language with more complex data structures and programs.

Love this book. I set myself at a pace to read about 10 pages a day and that seemed to be a good pace for me. Soaked in the material very well and I love the exercises. I have a few minor gripes but nothing worth docking a star for. For example they occasionally use features you haven't learned yet without explaining, there are a couple things I don't think they spend enough time on or make you practice enough (eg: working with filehandles) and I think toward the end of the book they got a little bit lazy with the exercises. Also you'll hate the flintstones by the end of the book.Those gripes aside this is a fantastic way to learn Perl. The first script I wrote after finishing the book was over 500 lines and automated a painful task I had to do every day at work.

This book is very good, and by far the best Perl book1. it has emphasized a lot on perl principle:2. it compares a lot of different usage and lead you to know how and why3. it has a lot of informationI have ever bought another perl book "beginning perl by Jame Lees", and read about it. Though the latter is a good book, it has not touched why and how to use perl when there are choices. That has forced me to continue to search for another book.Actually I find this book by luck. I had attended some perl training program, and it has touched a lot more in-depth about perl. Then I found this book is one of the two major reference book.The only drawback is that the book can be more compact by cutting those verbose sentences. So, I am skipping a lot of readings by jumping from examples to examples to understand concepts, why and how to use perl.

If you want to learn perl, then this is the book you need to buy and work through. There is none better.

Perl is still useful. It is not as popular as it used to be. It is a dead end language in the sense that very few open sourceware is providing Perl connectors. Perl still beats shell and Python for text processing, reporting, and writing large shell scripts. This book will get you ramped up enough to write moderately complex scripts that do not use classes and advanced Perl features like the map function and testing

I bought this book after reading an earlier edition from the library twice. I hadn't touched programming since BASIC as a kid, and even then I just copied projects from books.Schwartz goes through the basic principles of Perl in a logical and concise manner. I found through my first read I had to go a lot slower around regular expressions and take my own notes, and test out what he was telling me. I was able to easily grasp the concepts, even without being right in front of a computer the whole time.I still will pull out Learning and Intermediate Perl whenever I start a Perl project, because both books make great references after reading through them.Highly recommend this book if you are looking for a language that will manipulate data quickly and effectively.

The book arrived in great condition and is an excellent intro to Perl, presenting concepts in a sensible order and makes everything easy to grasp with great examples and exercises. Reads much more easily than the Camel book, getting you from 0 to writing useful code much more quickly. I definitely recommend it!

especially for someone who's been programming for a while. It is a read-through book rather than a reference work, which is good because Perl is different enough that it's easy to miss how it differs from the standard languages like Java, C, etc.