Perl for C Programmers

I'm a C/C++ guy so I bought this book after seeing the title and browsing through it. It is a very good book. It goes over a lot of topics, comparing how C does things to Perl (each of which has advantages in different areas). The author writes in a clear and concise manner. He could go in more depth in certain sections, but overall I was pleased.

After years of trying, I've finally learned Perl. And it's all thanks to this book. My biggest obstacles to learning Perl have always been: the language's twisted, almost willfully obscure syntax, and the chattiness, annoying humor, and equally obscure tone of the language's leading book for beginners, which I will leave nameless (hint: there's an animal on the cover.) It often seems as if both the book and the language take a perverse pride in being so arbitrary, riddled with exceptions and special cases, and overly complex. I'm sure most Perl people will disagree with me, but most Java and C/C++ folks I know would not. We are really past the point in history where it's funny or cute for a language to be so difficult and obscure. More than ever, time is money, the latter of which is in far shorter supply since the dot-com crash. We (and our bosses) just want to get things done. Not everyone wants to be a funny hacker with a funny t-shirt who thinks it's funny when no one else can understand their code. Unfortunately, while Perl is the champion of the heavy-lifting in text processing, its extremely flexible and often counter-intuitive syntax can make these benefits inaccessible to many programmers. Furthermore, the unnamed introductory book has a chatty folksy, verbose tone that seems to deepen and celebrate these faults. Oualline's book turns out to be the antidote. Using a brief, business-like tone, the author brings the logic and organization of the C language to bear in his approach to teaching and using Perl. Here's a quote from the book that sums up Oualline's mindset: "Perl's designers have stated that their philosophy in designing Perl is 'There's more than one way to do it.' My philosophy is a little different: 'There is only one clearest way to do it.'" Basically, by taking a single, C-flavored route through Perl's syntax, shunning its more confusing and counter-intuitive elements, Oualline provides you with an empowering, working knowledge of the language. Once he gets you there, you finally see just how awesome a language Perl can be, particularly for reporting and system administration. In short, Oualline teaches you to speak Perl with a C accent. One example of this is the way he recommends that you write Perl subroutines. Contrary to nearly every published piece of Perl documentation, he tells you to declare all of them with parameter specifications. That is, if you are writing a subroutine called "do_it" that will always accept two scalar parameters, write: "sub do_it ($$) { . . . }" instead of "sub do_it { . . . }". Sure, this is less fun and less flexible than not specifying parameters, which Perl will allow you to do. But in Oualline's opinion, "[that] form of parameter passing should be avoided. By using a parameter specification, you give Perl the capability to do valuable parameter checking. Leave out the parameter specification, and you invite chaos." Like I said, this goes against all conventiona

I started a job where I was forced to use perl, this book became incredibly useful. I use it to write perl code that makes sense to me. Most other books I've read didn't get me nearly as far in as short of a time period. My background is C/Assembly programming, so this was perfect. I recommend it for those who want to learn perl, by choice, or not.