Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days

...when buying books. If the book says "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 days", any advanced topics that it covers is gravy. Obviously it's a beginners book. Some of the complaints I've read are just silly. "Don't buy the book because Lemay got a math formula wrong" (if you know what the right formula is, great. She's not supposed to teach you algebra too!), "don't buy the book because when you're done learning everything that the book has to offer (which is substantial) it won't turn into a super advanced book" (go buy one of those 2000 page tomes that tries to please everyone and only succeeds in breaking your back). No book can please everyone. However, if the book clearly lets you know that it's a beginners book, and you insist on complaining that that is what it is,... duh?I orginally bought this book because I had a need to write a script to connect to a db. I found out that perl could talk to dbs, so I decided that this would be a cool way to learn perl. So I tried to find a perl book that talked about connection to dbs. Unfortunately, the few books out there that talked about this assumed you were an expert in perl and had no time to teach it to you. So I realized that I needed a good, quick foundation in perl.I dusted of my perl for dummies book. Now this is a true beginners book. Way too lightweight! This book will not prepare you for perl code that you'd see in the "real world". The important part is, THIS BOOK WILL! The greatest thing that an author can do for you is give you a spoon so that you can feed yourself. This book does that.By the way, this book has a lot of topics that I haven't seen in "advanced" books. Don't think that it's a lightweight. The author does cover enough material so you can educate yourself afterwards. I probably have about 40+ technical books, and this is one of the better ones. As someone who makes a living developing web apps, I need to be able to learn new stuff QUICKLY and get projects done. This author helped me greatly in this regard.

This book is both an outstanding tutorial of the Perl language as well as a rather comprehensive reference book to keep on your shelf. I think I was writing productive scripts in 3 or four days and actually optimizing useful software within a week. Using this book as a reference, I've learned more about CGI than I'll need to know in the next five years. Great BOOK!

Without a doubt, the single best book I have ever read. I read this book 5 years ago before the Internet buzz took off. I had no programming and little computer background. This book taught me the basics of what I needed to know to become a top programmer (over 500 of my scripts and programs to date that appear all over the Web). I have read over a dozen other Perl books and this is still my favorite - easy to follow, clear examples and logical progression. It is neither overwhelming nor intimidating rather an enjoyable and educational read.

I bought and used the Teach yourself Perl in 21 days for Perl 4 and found it extremely usefulI am an experienced programmer with C, Pascal and awk, but a few years ago, I was prepared to do a project in Awk and a fellow programmer recommended that I look into Perl, since it was becoming popular on the web.I picked up "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days" and quickly grew attached to the language.The plusses of the book:-it's well laid out day by day for people just starting out. -Someone with a little more experience can skip most of the the first week and get right into the heart of the language.-It has a useful index. While not perfect, the index lets you get to most everything.My copy is getting ratty, I've used it so much in the last few years. I think anyone who knows another procedural language who wants to learn perl should get this book.

I actually have an earlier edition of this book entitled simply "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days." I cannot vouch specifically for the current version, but if it is anything like the one I have, I recommend it to anyone who's trying to learn how to create their own scripts in Perl. The book I have does not go into integrating scripts with the web (which is all I use Perl for), but apparently this new version does. It's a great book for beginning programmers. In fact, this is the first language that I really learned and did so primarily from this book. It takes you step by step with many examples through just about every aspect of the language. I still use it as a reference when trying to debug scripts!