Perl is a versatile, powerful programming language used in a variety of disciplines, ranging from system administration to web programming to database manipulation. One slogan of Perl is that it makes easy things easy and hard things possible. "Intermediate Perl" is about making the leap from the easy things to the hard ones.
Originally released in 2003 as "Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules" and revised and updated for Perl 5.8, this book offers a gentle but thorough introduction to intermediate programming in Perl. Written by the authors of the best-selling "Learning Perl," it picks up where that book left off. Topics include:
Packages and namespaces
References and scoping
Manipulating complex data structures
Object-oriented programming
Writing and using modules
Testing Perl code
Contributing to CPAN
Following the successful format of "Learning Perl," we designed each chapter in the book to be small enough to be read in just an hour or two, ending with a series of exercises to help you practice what you've learned. To use the book, you just need to be familiar with the material in "Learning Perl" and have ambition to go further.
Perl is a different language to different people. It is a quick scripting tool for some, and a fully-featured object-oriented language for others. It is used for everything from performing quick global replacements on text files, to crunching huge, complex sets of scientific data that take weeks to process. Perl is what you make of it. But regardless of what you use Perl for, this book helps you do it more effectively, efficiently, and elegantly.
"Intermediate Perl" is about learning to use Perl as aprogramming language, and not just a scripting language. This is the book that turns the Perl dabbler into the Perl programmer.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Intermediate Perl has good code, good examples:
This book has good perl examples and good perl code. It is a good choice if you have an intermediate understanding of the perl language.
A worthy (as expected) successor:
Successors are not always as expected. In this case you do get from this trio of authors, who are classics in their own right, just what you expect. In my own case, I needed to get good at OO Perl and fast. In three days, I covered the major chapters thoroughly, went off to my interview and in the end was told, "hey, you really know your stuff". This book intends and does indeed follow well the Learning Perl classic. If you finished the meat of the classic, this is the dessert. You'll recognize the writing... more info
Good follow up to the The Llama, but poorly organised:
If you've mastered The Llama, make haste to read this one. Even if you only want to do scripting with Perl, you'll eventually find you need data structures slightly more complicated than just flat arrays and hashes, and you need to know about references for that. While The Camel does contain a fair chunk of material on just this subject, it was a bit too much for me to digest after The Llama. If Intermediate Perl (aka The Alpaca) had been around for me to read, I would have had a much easier time.more info
Good Book For Classroom Setting:
I picked up this book for a class that I was teaching at my office. The goal of the class was to train HTML/CSS/JavaScript and/or Java programmers to code in Perl since a large portion of our code base is written in Perl. Overall, I think that the book was a good choice for the class for a number of reasons. First of all, the book is already written with a classroom setting in mind. The authors have used previous versions of the book, titled "Learning Perl Objects, References and Modules", for their... more info
