Learning Perl, popularly known as "the Llama," is the book most programmers rely on to get started with Perl. The bestselling Perl tutorial since it was first published in 1993, this new fifth edition covers recent changes to the language up to Perl 5.10. This book reflects the combined experience of its authors, who have taught Perl at Stonehenge Consulting since 1991. Years of classroom testing and experience helped shape the book's pace and scope, and this edition is packed with exercises that let you practice the concepts while you follow the text. Topics include: Perl data & variable types Subroutines File operations Regular expressions String manipulation Lists & sorting Process management Smart matching Using third party modules Perl is the language for people who want to get work done. Originally targeted to sysadmins for heavy-duty text processing, Perl is now a full-featured programming language suitable for almost any task on almost any platform-from short fixes on the command line to web applications, bioinformatics, finance, and much more. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.
In this smooth, carefully paced course, a leading Perl trainer teaches you to program in the language that threatens to make C, sed, awk, and the Unix shell obsolete for many tasks. This book is the "official" guide for both formal (classroom) and informal learning. It is fully accessible to the novice programmer.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Good book for beginners to PERL:
For folks who are new to PERL this is a good book to learn the language. The presentation is easy to understand and illustrations help us grasp the concepts faster. There are exercises at the end of each chapter which helps in getting to do hands-on programming. I would have liked more exercises in some of the chapters. It would have been better if there were questions / challenges spread along the chapter.
A programming library's foundation title and a highly recommended pick:
LEARNING PERL is a programming library's foundation title and a highly recommended pick: it covers all the basics of what most programmers use and need to get started with Perl, and offers up a fifth edition of a classic first published in 1993. The latest changes to the software including Perl 5.10 are covered in chapters that discuss file operations, expressions, matching, and more. It also covers all kinds of platforms, from web applications to finance, and goes beyond the usual 'how to program in Perl'... more info
Irritating comments:
The book is irritating. (-2 star) I keep wasting my time looking for every little star, cross, double cross, ... symbol in the text. Almost every page has comments at the bottom, and these comments are denoted by tiny symbols. I'd like to see the authors find all the text that goes with all those comments. They really need to listen to their own advice and write the book for people who will be reading it.
The book is incomplete. (-1 star) The authors keep mentioning things that will be discussed... more info
If you're looking for the best Perl introduction, this is it:
An oft-repeated allegation against Perl is that it is write-only. In my opinion, this allegation is usually made by programmers proficient in other languages that have trouble understanding or following Perl idioms (one trivial example: the use of for loops instead of the Perl-native foreach loop). The value of this book is that it teaches a beginner how to use idiomatic Perl. Someone learning Perl from this book will, in course of time, distinguish between line noise and well-written Perl. A... more info
