Intermediate Perl

This is a great reference book for Perl. Combine this with the Perl Cookbook and you have your tools to tackle your Perl coding tasks. Great book.

Successors are not always as expected. In this case you do get from this trio of authors, who are classics in their own right, just what you expect. In my own case, I needed to get good at OO Perl and fast. In three days, I covered the major chapters thoroughly, went off to my interview and in the end was told, "hey, you really know your stuff". This book intends and does indeed follow well the Learning Perl classic. If you finished the meat of the classic, this is the dessert. You'll recognize the writing style and flavour. There are no surprises. In my opinion, another classic.

I picked up this book for a class that I was teaching at my office. The goal of the class was to train HTML/CSS/JavaScript and/or Java programmers to code in Perl since a large portion of our code base is written in Perl. Overall, I think that the book was a good choice for the class for a number of reasons. First of all, the book is already written with a classroom setting in mind. The authors have used previous versions of the book, titled "Learning Perl Objects, References and Modules", for their own courses. This updated version benefits from all of the hours of empirical testing that it has received in the classroom. There are many thoughtful additions like having all of the chapters close to the same size. This allowed for me to assign a single chapter per session and know that I could comfortably fit the lecture and discussion of the chapter into a two-hour session. There are also exercises at the end of each chapter and answers for those exercises (with discussion) in an appendix. This book is good for getting people just learning the language ready for the TMTOWTDI/TIMTOWTDI aspect of Perl. Take something simple like opening files... there are at least four 'standard' ways to do it. The book prepares you for all of the different versions of annoyances/features like this that show up in Perl code by walking through the evolution of the feature. Another reason that I like this selection of book is that data files and code examples are actually available for download. I've been shocked that some of the programming books that I've gotten lately actually don't have this addition. Finally, the course that I'm teaching is for people who probably already know how to program, at least a little, but they don't know Perl. I didn't want to drag them through all of the picky details of the language by starting with "Learning Perl" or something equivalent. This book has been a good choice for introducing programmers to Perl. I do have to stop occasionally and explain some fundamentals of the language, but not too often... maybe I just work with smart (or shy) people :) Of course, the book isn't perfect. As odd as it seems, one of the biggest complaints that I get is over the Gilligan references that are used in all of the examples in the book. There is also some coverage of packaging modules for CPAN. This is useful, just not for the particular class that I'm teaching, so we skipped that chapter. Of course, both of these complaints are pretty weak. In short, this is a good book, especially if you are doing a training session about Perl.

The first edition of this book was "Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules". I never read that previous edition, so I can't comment on how that book stacks up against this new edition. This book is intended to pick up where Learning Perl left off. Its purpose is to show you how to use Perl to write larger more complex programs. As in Learning Perl, each chapter is small enough to read in an hour or so. Each chapter ends with a series of exercises to help you practice what you've just learned, and the answers are in the appendix for your reference. You don't have to know Unix to benefit from this book. Most everything in this book applies equally well to Windows ActivePerl from ActiveState and all other modern implementations of Perl. To use this book effectively, you just need to be familiar with the material in Learning Perl and have the ambition to go further. You should read this book from beginning to end, stopping to do the exercises as you go along. The following is the structure of the book: Chapter 1, Introduction, just goes over what you should already know and how to use the book. Chapter 2, Intermediate Foundations, introduces some intermediate-level Perl idioms used throughout the book. These are the things that typically set apart the beginning and intermediate Perl programmers. Chapter 3, Using Modules, is about the building blocks for Perl programs. They provide reusable subroutines, variables, and even object-oriented classes. It also looks at the basics of using modules that others have already written. Chapter 4 introduces references, which are the basis for complex data structures, object-oriented programming (OOP), and fancy subroutine magic. They're the magic that was added between Perl version 4 and version 5 to make it all possible. A Perl scalar variable holds a single value. An array holds an ordered list of one or more scalars. A hash holds a collection of scalars as values, keyed by other scalars. Although a scalar can be an arbitrary string, which allows complex data to be encoded into an array or hash, none of the three data types are well suited to complex data interrelationships. This is a job for the reference, which enables a level of redirection that allows the same code to operate on different sets of data. Chapter 5, References and Scoping shows how to copy and pass around references like any other scalar. At any given time, Perl knows the number of references to a particular data item. Perl can also create references to anonymous data structures and create references automatically as needed to fulfill certain kinds of operations. This chapter look at copying references and how it affects scoping and memory usage. Chapter 6, Manipulating Complex Data Structures, starts by using the debugger to examine complex data structures and then uses Data::Dumper to show the data under programmatic control. Next, you learn to store and retrieve complex data easily and quickly using Storable, and finally you

For Perl programmers looking to make more of the language than just scripting this is the ideal 'step up' book. Object Oriented features of Perl are covered well. Writing and publishing CPAN modules is also covered, as are unit testing concepts. If you want to expand your Perl world view this is an ideal second book to go along with the classic Programming Perl.