Professional Perl Programming

I initially didn't have time to read this book, and it made a much better reference than O'Reilly's book because it didn't assume you knew what you were doing. The index is nice, and the table of contents helps find anything you don't know the name for - it's all logically organized. When I finally got around to reading it, it was actually a nice read too. So far this has been my experience with all the Wrox books I've gotten. They cover well what they cover, but don't always cover everything.

This is a very good Perl book! For beginners, intermediates or even advanced programmers in Perl. The book takes you from the basics to advanced applied Perl programming concepts.The book manages what many others fail to do: It might be the only Perl book you ever need. If you worked through this book, additional information is readily available on the Internet. This book is comprehensive enough to cover everything you need to know about the Perl language to write large scale 'mission critical' applications. Admitted, if you already own the O'Reillys 'Learning Perl', 'Perl' and 'Perl Cookbook' this book will not contain many news. However, it is written very well and it is understandable, something I cannot always say about the 'original' Perl books or documentation.If you do web programming, a logical addition to this book is 'Professional Perl Development' which offers lots of good information on how to design sophisiticated web applications.

This is an excellent, thorough, fairly advanced book. Until now, I was an o'reilly zealot, clinging to my camel book and my CD bookshelf as the Only True Word. Finally, here is the first real competitor to that series of books, with a fresh approach to the language that shows that the authors really know what they are doing.So far, the book has done a great job covering all my industrial-strength perl questions with _examples that work_ and clear, concise explanations of the methods and the context. I find that the examples are really applicable to my professional needs as a contract perl programmer.There's a great section on object-oriented perl, as well as a good debugging section.IMHO, This is the best perl book out in a while.

All the books I have read in he programmer to programmer series of Wrox press were excellent. (e.g. PHP).Professional perl is not an exception. This book covers all the aspects of Perl - the hacker language. The book explains very well the basic concepts of perl in the initial chapters, then moves over to advanced features. Chapters 7 to 9 worth special appreciation as well as chapter 11 , in which regex is dealt in a detailed and perspicacious manner. The authers strived hard to give the reader a clear picture of Object Oriented perl and Networking perl, which are the chapters I liked most. The chapter about Unicode (utf8) seems is very well written. I could not decipher what Larry intended to convey before reading this chapter. Even though I felt the book is primarily targetted at Unix and clones users, I am sure that Win32 perl programmers will also get benefitted by this book. The authers could make this more evident by concentrating a little more on the chapter Writing portable perl.Together with Programming Perl ( Larry wall , O'reilly) this book is really an asset for any perl programmer.Omanakuttan.N.