Beginning Perl

Beginning Perl really is an excellent resource for anyone looking to learn the language - novice to expert. Even if you have absolutely no programming experience, the book starts out from the beginning by covering not only things you will need to know to learn Perl, but also good general programming practices. If you are an expert programmer, the book is written in a way that makes it easy to scan through and pick up on some things that you may not know or refresh your memory on some things that may not be completely clear. The index in the back is also great for use as a reference. Nothing can compare to the usefulness of a good Internet search engine (see Google) for use as a reference, but the book does quite a good job. It is nice to have something tangible in front of you to walk you through some tutorials and build up your knowledge of the language in a methodical way. Personally, the book has helped me to become comfortable using Perl to do "everyday tasks" (everyday in the context of an obsessive computer user), perform my necessary job functions (manipulating massive text files), and become a better programmer. I used to know next to nothing about Perl, although I did have a solid background in other languages. With this book, and some help from the Internet, I was able to become a sufficient Perl programmer within a week. Perl is a great language that every person in the computing field should know. There's literally hundreds of great tutorials and books on the subject that will suffice, but I would stress the value of having a well-written book sitting in front of you while you learn. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn Perl.

I use this book to teach Perl in a university course. I feel it does a very good job at exposing just enough of Perl to make it useful without confusing beginning students. I chose this over O'Reilly's Learning Perl (also a good book) because this book goes into References, Modules and a bit of OO Perl, and also has what I feel is slightly better treatment of shortcuts like $_ as well as lexically-scoped variables with 'my'. O'Reilly has broken these topics across two books (Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl), both fine books but I only want the students to have to buy one book. I feel that Perl is not very useful without references, so that was the major reason for switching to this book for a beginning Perl course. I highly recommend it.

I had no idea what Perl was when I bought this book. After a week of reading, I was able to write basic scripts and perform a variety of tasks. I am not a developer, and do not plan to become one. But I am always curious about how to do difference things. This book will not make you a super Perl programmer, but it will teach you all the basics and then some.

This is a very capable introduction to Perl that I think is intended for reasonably experienced programmers. It is not intended to teach Perl as a first computer language, and it does not pander to the reader. The Perl it teaches is strong industry standard Perl that is in line with what could reasonably be considered best practice. That's something in a language that prides itself on having many ways to do one thing. The book covers the entire topic of Perl from the basics of writing a script, through functions, modules, and into object oriented programming. It also covers vital community information such as the use of CPAN. If you have not read Programming Perl then I believe you should start there. But if you find that book has too much of a learning curve then I would recommend this book or Learning Perl (O'Reilly.)

Beginning Perl, 2nd edition, by James Lee, et al., is a splendid introduction to the Perl programming language, version 5.8.3. The flow of the book is logical, straightforward, and highly readable. Text is heavily sprinkled with program examples that the reader can easily try out along the way, as well as exercises at the end of most chapters, with solutions in the appendix. Chapters are short, clear, and engaging. After a brief discussion of the history of Perl and a listing of numerous helpful online resources, the book quickly moves on to the logistics of running a Perl program, followed by descriptions of basic program elements and control flow. Then it's ahead to more sophisticated data elements - lists, arrays, and hashes - and finally functions and subroutines. After a solid and seemingly effortless explanation of these "basics," the book moves to one of the most powerful features in Perl - regular expressions - and how these can be used to access files and data. From there, the discussion expands to string processing and references. The book concludes with discussions of more "advanced" Perl features, including object-orientation, modules, and use with webservers and databases. Regardless of topic, the writing style stays crisp, clear, and example-filled, making this book a highly effective and enjoyable way to get a jump-start into Perl programming for the novice or a quick refresher for the expert wanting a Perl 5 update.