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Perl by Example (3rd Edition)
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Author: Ellie Quigley
List Price: $44.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0130282510
Publisher: Pearson Higher Education (07 September, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 43,541
Average Customer Rating: 3.68 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
not bad, but there are better introductions out there
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).
Rating: 3 out of 5
Nothing to get excited about
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.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Excellent Explanations, Sparse Coverage
I picked up this book as a tutorial/reference for my Perl class. Overall I found this books explanations to be very clear and comprehensible for even the novice. There are many good illustrative examples. It covers some very important features like sort, map, grep and also split. The regular expression coverage is really well done. In addition to coverage these foundation concepts, the book also delves into some more advanced features of Perl such as file i/o and database (DBI).Despite, the this excellent work, I have found the book does have some shortcomings that I think should be taken into account. There are several foundation concepts that are not adequately covered. For example, substr() only has a little reference blurb, but one cannot comprehend what substr is doing without seeing adequate examples. The vanilla reference from PerlDoc.com is a bit more adequate. I also found the file i/o cumbersome to sift through. I had to hunt for information I needed. The book's attempt to be platform neutral, or rather multi-platform embracing, is great. I thought adding Mac and Win coverage for file i/o was more than appropriate and very useful. However, when covering advanced features, I wish Quigley could have sprinkled some resourceful platform specific coverage, such as Administration, Registry, and OLE Automation (VBA-like functionality) on Windows, or OSA (Open Scripting Architecture) or AppleScript-like functionality, on the Macintosh. Overall, I think the book is excellent, but definately not the only book needed for foundation concepts of Perl. In my narrow scope of getting a good reference book for my Perl course, I would have chosen another book.
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