Programming Perl (3rd Edition)

Author: Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant List Price: $49.95 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0596000278 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates (01 July, 2000) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 4,836 Average Customer Rating: 4.17 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

But unlike the bat book, and much as I respect this book and its authors, I find using it absolutely infuriating, not least because the index is a mess. Remember that perl is full of obscure little atoms like ., ^, $* and so on. You need an index that lists every darn one and their combinations. Unfortunately, the indexers of this book did not complete the job, which means that if you quickly want to refresh your memory about something small but important (like: whats the regular expression for whitespace, or is it .= or =. for string appends), you have to go trawling through the whole book.

After reading some of the reviews here, I am reminded of when I first picked up this book and didn't have the background to fully appreciate it.

After using Perl for several years doing Internet programming, and being exposed to all the languages it's possible to use, I still remain devoted to the work of this man, Larry Wall for what I believe to be the greatest contribution of all to humanity and to computer science.

I stopped here to reaffirm that the third edition will cover Object Oriented programming. Although nobody mentions this, I'm sure he will, and another book I have said it would.

Before brushing up on Object Oriented programming for Perl, I decided to re-read Learning Perl and Programming Perl (though I only had the first editions). Unlike the first times I attempted to read these two books, this time I was dumbfounded at how much info they (Larry and Randal) could cram into such a short place. One thing builds upon another. Everything written, the examples and all, took on new meaning. This was exciting reading because all the problems that it took me years to even identify were spelled out before me with examples I could immediately understand. There are many ways to do things in Perl, and my way, the obvious way, usually turns out to be the long way. Reading these books and adopting some new techniques they mention could literally save me years of time!

It's a lot like learning music. Unless someone tells you why you have to learn scales, you won't enjoy doing it and unless you stick with it long enough, you'll never learn why you need to know them.

I guess I'd have to say that sooner or later you will need these two books to be truly effective as a Perl programmer, but if you are a beginner, you won't know enough about Perl to realize why these are really great books. If you have several years of Perl experience, then these books will show you how to be incredibly effective, incredibly organized, and best of all, incredibly lazy!

One thing that makes Perl so strong, is that anything that has ever been done with Unix can be done with Perl. If you're operating equipment with Microsoft software, you're missing half the fun.

This book really shines if you already love Perl and worship those who spent enormous amounts of time making their priceless contributions.

This is probably not a good book if you're new to Perl, in a hurry, and are trying to debug some broken code.

I found "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days" by Sams Publishing to be all I needed in my early days. I only wish I had the ability to appreciate the information in these other two books then.

I am convinced that Perl is the highest level programming language there is and there is absolutely nothing that can't be done with it in less time and with less code than any other language.

Now I'm going to buy a brand new Programming Perl 3rd edition and I think I'll even have it shipped overnight!

If you're new to perl, then I'd suggest also purchasing "Learning Perl" by the same publisher. It's probably a bit easier to use when just picking up the language - but the reference book is a must have as well.

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