Perl Pocket Reference, 4th Edition

Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (2nd Edition)

Perl Cookbook, Second Edition

Perl by Example (3rd Edition)

Perl Books

Perl for Dummies (Fourth Edition)

Format: Paperback
Author: Paul Hoffman
ReleaseDate: 21 March, 2003
Publisher: For Dummies
Rating:

It's ok.
I gave it a speed read out of curiosity. I happened on this book while cleaning out an ex-employees cube.

This book is a "baby steps" book. Don't look at it to learn how to write scripts for your job. It is a beginners book. Especially if you have never programmed and you have recently heard about Perl.

The scripts you will find in here are very very basic and not really usable for "serious" needs.

As I mentioned this is a "baby steps" book, there are some sections which I thought might be overkill and could cause confusion.

Part IV (the info link on the book shows what's there) probably could have been left for another book or simply left as a section for "stuff to look at. "

The same for the section on Perl and CGI. There is far too much to do it justice in one chapter of a beginner book.

I was happy to see map and glob mentioned. They are two commands that are often overlooked and very very useful.

Again if you are new to programming and Perl then this book is ok for a light weight introduction.

If you understand programming concepts and want to learn Perl, I would suggest the Learning Perl book from O'Reilly or Beginning Perl by Simon Cozens over this book.

Let me get my hands dirty, already...
. This book provides a decent overview of Perl's capabilities, but has one fatal flaw.. it doesn't really get you programming. I read the whole book, and got to the end having some ideas about the kinds of things Perl can do, but not really knowing how to do any of them. Get Perl by Example, instead. It gets you writing code from the get go, and goes farther in giving you an understanding of how Perl works.

OK, but you can do better.
Perhaps because PERL users are so diverse that hitting on all the various wants would take too long? I found this book lacking in substance. This book was not up to the 'Dummies' standard, in my opinion. That is, you could finish this book with no real feeling of competence in basic PERL scripting. I strongly suggest "Learning PERL" instead.