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Title: Programming Perl (3rd Edition) by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant ISBN: 0-596-00027-8 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 01 July, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.15 (212 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Who said ....
Comment: The book is definetely written for those who at least have some (or maybe a little more than just "some") programming background, and willing to learn Perl from the author of the language.
I read the first edition of the book, which was about 200 pages, or something in that range, which filled my mind with nothing but questions. Current edition, however, could answer to all of those questions (well, almost). Of course, to make it answer them I had to re-read the book four times. But none of the books I currently own (and I own quite a few) could've taken me to the innards of the language so deep no matter how many times I had read them. So the book is of value.
The Camel book, especially, does a great job on Regular Expressions and pattern matching. If you want to learn RegEx of perl in very details, you definitely need listen to the author of Perl. "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl is also a good choise, but doesn't include the latest updates.
Formats aren't covered very well though. So you might consider "The Lama book" for that ("Learning Perl"). Still, none of the books can tell you about the innards of the Perl in so much detail overall than "Programming Perl".
OOP is also toched upon in the book. Since purpose of the author is not to preach you OO lingo (but plain Perl), you'll treat that part just as an intorduction to OOP and consider "Object Oriented perl" by Damian Convey as the next text book.
I found chpater 14, "Tied variables" very helpfull though. It might remind you of DBM/Berkley DB, through the syntax
tie my %db, 'AnyDBM_File', 'my_file', O_CREAT|O_RDWR, 0664;
but unfortunately it's not about DBM at all. It is about how the "tie" function works, and teaches you how to create your own classes for implementing with "tie". After that chapter, I even had to update some of my classes and saved lots of time for their updates.
"Compiling", chapter 18 ,is a must read chapter for those who "live & breath" with Perl (like me, may be ?).
I don't want you to buy the book unless you have a good understanding of Programming or/and have knowledge of some programming languages. Otherwise, it won't help at all.
If your purpose is just to get started with Web applications, go for "CGI progamming 101" by Jacqueline Hamilton. It is a good start. But if you want to go even deeper, "Learning Perl" and "Perl Coookbook" is the next choise. Keep the "The Camel" book as the next (but definitely, not the last).
Rating: 4
Summary: Well-written, but tries too hard to disguise Perl's flaws
Comment: To be very short about it: Perl is a great language for some things (small scripts), but a bad language for other things (systems programming). In this book, Larry Wall tries very hard to convince you that Perl is the programming language for everyone -- that it does everything. It doesn't.
If you read this book with the knowledge that Perl is Larry Wall's baby, you won't be fooled into thinking it's the uber-language. In particular, Wall's description of how Perl does OOP is laughable; he lambastes other languages for taking a paranoid view of data-hiding, which is a smokescreen so that you won't realize how badly Perl does OOP.
It's best to read this book if you're in the middle of a programming project involving Perl. That way you'll KNOW what it does well and what it does badly. It does regular expressions exceedingly well. Its lack of data typing slows down the programmer. Larry Wall will not tell you these things; he will attack C and C++ for their deficits, but will carefully ignore Perl's.
So in short, it teaches Perl very well, but the fact that it lies to the reader at a fundamental level makes me remove one star. When Larry puts out an honest fourth edition, the fifth star will return.
Rating: 5
Summary: An indespensible book for die-hard perl programmers
Comment: If you are a programmer, with an extensive background in programming theory, and a passion for Perl, this book is for you. This book, written by the creator of Perl, contains more details about Perl than one could possibly find in any other book. This book doens't hold back in discussing perl topics, but rather it discusses them inside and out without excluding anything. For someone who has a thorough foundation in Perl, this is definitely the next step in exploring Perl.
If you are a casual programmer though, I must caution you that this book is pretty intense reading. I found it helps to read this book while reading the "Perl Cookbook". The chapters for each book correlate to each other. This book explains how everything works, while the Cookbook shows you how to apply these concepts in real life situations.
One complaint I had about this book were the unclear examples. Other books by O'Reilly such as "Learning Perl" and "Perl Cookbook" will label each line of code in their examples so that there is no ambiguity. However the example scripts in this book are sparsely labled, so it is not always clear what the author's intent is.
However, if you feel up to the challenge, I would definitely recommend this book. After reading this book, your understanding of Perl will improve dramatically. In addition, the last few chapters will provide a very useful reference regarding Perl's many modules, functions and such. For serious programmers, you will thank yourself for buying this book.
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Title: Learning Perl, Third Edition by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix ISBN: 0596001320 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 July, 2001 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Perl Cookbook, Second Edition by Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington ISBN: 0596003137 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 21 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl ISBN: 0596002890 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Advanced Perl Programming by Sriram Srinivasan ISBN: 1565922204 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 01 August, 1997 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: CGI Programming with Perl by Gunther Birznieks, Scott Guelich, Shishir Gundavaram ISBN: 1565924193 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates Pub. Date: 15 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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