Perl Pocket Reference: Programming Tools

This was neat as I was learning scripting. Still a nub at it but great for me who doesnt use it daily.

Out of my fairly extensive Perl library, this is the book that sits next to my keyboard - the one that I keep "at-hand". Simple, concise, easy to find the data you are looking for .... it just "works" as a reference book. No, you're not going to find the syntax for building and manipulating a hash of hashes, but you've got the full list of special variables, a good list of common functions, and great starting points for things like Network programming, Win32 programming, regular expressions, and more. Definitely worth the price of entry if you are a beginner to moderate Perl programmer who doesn't code every day and frequently needs a reference.

Gerald W. Irmler writes in his review "I also have two very large Perl books that are also almost useless, so maybe it's a Perl problem." Well yes, Perl is not an easy language, but I suspect that the main problem here is an Irmler problem. This book does a very good job of doing what it intends to. Another clue that Irmler is lacking a clue is the baffling comment that "The author seemed more interested in being clever and funny, then (sic) imparting information." Huh? The book is comprised entirely of very succinct facts about the language. There is no style here to speak of, due to the nature of the book. I rate this book 5 stars, Irmler -5 stars.

"Perl Pocket Reference" has the dense information content of "Perl in a nutshell" with extra readability and decreased size. However, in it's subject matter it more closely resembles "programming perl" (aka: camel), because it only covers the language itself. I own all three of these books, and even when they are all within arms reach, I still use this pocket reference more than the other two books, for two reasons:1)As a beginner (in Perl), many of my questions can be answered with a small book such as "Perl Pocket Reference".2)I don't have to sift through a lot of extraneous information to get answers quickly.This pocket reference is no substitute for the Camel, (or for a more complete reference such as "Perl in a nutshell") but it's a great solution for-finding succinct answers quickly-reminding yourself of the basics of some feature that you don't use much-serving as a beginner's reference, or-bringing to an open-book exam. ;-)Buy this book if you have another perl book and you want to get answers more efficiently.

If you are not one of the great Perl Wizards that know the syntax for every commands by heart, you should by this very handy book. This booklet is a reference book. Do not expect to learn Perl from scratch with this booklet (although I learned a lot of details :-). If you do not know Perl I recommend "Learning Perl" first. The 4th edition of "Perl Pocket Reference" has been enhanced to cover Perl 5.8. It adds some small enhancements for the new IO libraries, regular expressions and Unicode handling. The basics are still as good as in the 3rd edition (although a bit more cleaned up).I love this book because it is without any useless overhead. The information density is very high so make sure that you read this book slowly.This book covers "only" the Perl language (which is quite big compared to e.g. "C") It does not cover your favourite Perl module (e.g. DBI, LWP and so on). There are almost no examples in this book. If you look for examples I recommend e.g. "Perl Cookbook" from O'Reilly.I really like this book. What it tries to do, it does very well (small reference book of the Perl language). I have it always on my desk at work and I already gave away more than 20 copies (German and English versions) to my coworkers.