Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: A great book if you are familiar with coding.
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Learning Perl
Comment: This book is very well written. Although this book is technical, it is easy to read and follow. Many good resourses are listed in the book. Also, there are many examples and end of chapter questions that are very helpful in learning perl. I would recommend this to users who are looking at perl for the first time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A classic...
Comment: One of the reasons I don't quite think of myself as a computer geek (although I am) is that I don't know some of the "geeky" languages like Perl. I need to rectify that some day, and one of O'Reilly's books will help... Learning Perl (4th Edition) by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy. This is one of the classic Perl guides, and it's well worth owning.
Contents: Introduction; Scalar Data; Lists and Arrays; Subroutines; Input and Output; Hashes; In the World of Regular Expressions; Matching with Regular Expressions; Processing Text with Regular Expressions; More Control Structures; File Tests; Directory Operations; Strings and Sorting; Process Management; Perl Modules; Some Advanced Perl Techniques; Exercise Answers; Beyond the Llama; Index
Randal Schwartz is *the* best-selling Perl author and writer, and it shows in this book. He knows the subject inside and out, and knows how to communicate that knowledge to an audience. In Learning Perl, he and his fellow authors set out to cover the material that you'll use 90% of the time in day-to-day situations. Keeping that as the target, you'll get a lot of value out of working through this title. Each chapter also has a number of exercises at the end that will help you apply and solidify what you just learned. You can even cheat and check out the answers at the end, even though the authors beg you not to... :)
They do assume a background understanding of basic computing and programming concepts, so this wouldn't be the best title if you are looking to learn Perl as your first programming language. Of course, I don't think many people approach Perl from that perspective anyway, so it shouldn't be a problem. With that assumption in place, you end up getting into the meat of Perl quickly. Couple that with a nice conversational approach to the writing, and you've got a book that will take you far. Oh, and don't ignore the footnotes... Some useful information (and great humor) is hidden down there...
If you need to learn Perl and you want to get there quickly, Learning Perl is the way to go. It's stood the test of time by making it to the 4th edition, and there's a reason for that...
Customer Rating:
Summary: boo! Don't get this if your a beginner!
Comment: The fist chapter is completly screwed up. they start of with the simple "hello world" program then you would think they would build on that. He starts off with a simple but cool program to accept a NAME input and tell you hello, Then you build that by guessing a secret word and hence your into scalar varibles etc... But then all of a sudden he's got you writing out more code but he doesn't explain where that goes... I flip back a page and nope I dont see where we got off track, so then he puts it together and it looks NOTHING like you just been working on! This back and forth goes on and on and is a DISASTER for the 1st chapter read by a newbie. One time your writing a cool program then the next you get lost because the author doesn't explain what the f^&* is going on.??
Then he goes on to say "putting it all together it looks like this" but it doesn't! Loads and loads are left out or just not explained. I've got 5+ years in linux and I challenge ANYONE to explain that 1st chapter in a logical manner.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very good for the beginner
Comment: I've hacked around with perl a little bit and mostly used the faqs and learned things the hard way. This document is aimed right at the beginner, someone who's maybe used perl only for a day or too. On the other hand, it's really nifty that it gives the "tricks" that are difficult to find easily. Highly recommended to at least skim over if you can, and definitely a buy if you're new at Perl.
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