Learning Perl, Third Edition

Media:	Paperback
Author:	Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix
Publisher:	O'Reilly
Release date:	15 July, 2001
List price:	~~$34.95~~
Our price:	$23.07 that is 34% off!

Learning Perl, Third Edition

Average rating: Stars

A great book for learning, regardless of your background.

One highly ranked reviewer exaggerates that this book is only loved by expert Unix gurus and then steers you toward another title. Check the other reviews for yourself and you'll see this is a falsehood.

While Perl has its origins as the 'toolbox for Unix', this book is great for students learning Perl on ANY platform. I've been using the examples in this edition with the ActiveState distribution (available for AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows) on Windows and haven't had a single OS-related snag.

After trying several Perl books, all good mind you, this one's explanations, examples and exercises helped me finally get past Perl's reputation as a 'hairy' language and understand its beauty and efficiency for getting things done. It's clear from the quality of this book, that the authors have fine-tuned the content based on their years of experience teaching Perl, which they love.

I hope you use Amazon's "Look Inside" feature or browse a printed copy to decide which book is best for you.

Learning Perl, Third Edition - Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix

Read it again even if you've learned Perl

It's been a while since I introduced myself to Perl with the second edition of this book. A lot of time has gone between then and now, and I've become fairly confident that I have, in fact, learned Perl. Still, there's a lot of little things you can forget over the course of a few years. Might as well refresh myself now.

Yeah, I've forgotten a lot. Wow. Lots of little things that I forgot I could do, simply because I never needed to use them during that crucial gelling stage. This is a pretty good book, but my attention definitely wandered around the chapter on simple databases. Maybe the author could have swapped the last two chapters, since the "advanced" stuff like grep and map get used pretty much every day, while DBM files are at best used by a smaller lump of developers. But that's just my personal experience. Who knows?

It was worth reading, though. I think my Perl code will look a bit tighter and nicer than it has thanks to the little details that I missed the first time through.

Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix - Learning Perl, Third Edition

Actually, it's pretty good for beginners...

I found this to be an excellent introduction to Perl. The examples and solutions and the end of each chapter are effective teaching techniques. You don't need to know much about unix, awk, grep etc. to benefit from the book (if you're curious you can look these things up, but you won't loose anything without doing so). I knew nothing about Perl to begin with and was quite happy with what I learned by the end of this book. My only complaint about the book is that it didn't go far enough; it should have covered objects, classes, modules, packages, etc. I can't penalize the authors for this because these topics are more advanced, but it certainly would have been great if they did (I find that "The Perl Cookbook" doesn't explain these particularly well). Incidentally, I think you get a mixed bag with the O'Reilly series; for example, I'm happy with this book but lukewarm about "The Perl Cookbook" and "Learning PHP 5". I hope Schwartz and Phoenix author something more advanced pretty soon.

(3rd Edition)

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