Beginning Perl

I have been a part-time Perl coder over the last ten years and have around 15 Perl and Perl related manuals. I purchased this book back in 2000 and still use it today. When I compare my other manuals with this one, there is really no comparison. The book has a way of explaining and using examples to direct the user to create basic yet effective working perl scripts. Far too many Perl manuals jump from the very basic examples to more advanced topics leaving many stones unturned. When I compare other Perl manuals covering the same topics Cozen's covers, I ask myself, "how could the other writers not include this essential information?" This an essential Perl reference for the beginner or experienced user. I just wish this had been my first Perl rather than my fifteenth.

There is a second edition by the same title coming out, but without Simon Cozen listed as an author. Cannot say whether the 2nd edition is any good, but the out-of-print 1st edition is excellent. The first edition can be found online. I believe Simon is going to take a break from writing for a while. I hope he finds his way back to writing about Perl eventually.

Update 04-24-08: I will likely be dusting this book off and bring it in to work. The notes I wrote in it make it invaluable to me. There is a new version too. Ultra Edit is a good text editor and only costs $50 for the latest and greatest text version of the program. I spent a year with the book and went through almost every chapter in detail. I typed in nearly every chapter, wrote notes in the book, etc. It's not perfect and falls a little short occasionally in the area of being pro-active. By this I mean there are some areas where the author could have emphasized things a bit more. Also, he makes it seem like learning PERL is a breeze. I found it a lot of work after spending 2000 hrs with the book. I can can code pretty well and consider myself an intermediate non-professional. This language is an outstanding way to learning advanced programming techniques common to all languages. It is also something I will use as I move from windows 2k/xp to Mac OS X Tiger - which has perl built in and is accessible through the Terminal.app window. Bottom line: if you have a need to manipulate text based data files or even excel - since there are many plugins for Perl or want to do Web cgi scripts this is a great book although it does not focus on web applications but primarily on the building blocks of text manipulation and general programming fundamentals, loops, statements, troubleshooting, etc you cannot go wrong with this book. Also, don't be fooled by its size. It is the right size instead of a giant telephone book that you will never read like most programming books. Also, much more helpful for learning than the Perl in a nutshell classic O'reilly book.