Perl Pocket Reference, 4th Edition

Perl for Dummies (Fourth Edition)

Perl Cookbook, Second Edition

Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL: From Novice to Professional

Beginning Perl, Second Edition

Perl Books

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

Format: Paperback
Author: Laura Lemay
ReleaseDate: 31 May, 2002
Publisher: Sams
Rating:

Great book - clear and easy to read
It is well written and easy to follow. I find myself using this book as a refernce almost every day. I highly recommend it.

I haven't even finished the book and I am already feeling like a perl programmer
This book is definitely a better introduction to Perl than any other book I've seen. I bought this book after trying to learn Perl through another book (Perl for Bioinformatics). It is clear and concise enough and although it might be hard to finish it in 21 days, you can start coding your own scripts much before the end of the book. I am still on chapter 11 and I can program most of what I need with it (i. e parsers and simple bioinformatics applications). I recognize that there are a few typos on the book but if even Knuth's Art of Computer Programming have them why shouldn't Lemay's Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days do the same?

Given what I said above, I must warn begginer programmers (like me) that Perl is not the best language for you to learn as your first one. It is a dirty scripting language which does the job and is most suitable for parsing files and formatting data but it has a lot of things which make it quite confusing initially (its context dependency for instance). If you want to learn something that will give a solid programming base you should start with something else (i. e. Java, Pascal, Ruby etc) which will probably be a little bit harder but will payoff later.

Above Average Introduction
If Perl is your first programming language, then this book is a fairly good book to choose as a starting point. Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days by Laura Lemay is sufficient for the beginner wanting to learn Perl, be it on Windows or a UNIX-based operating system. It teaches the basics of programming in Perl and moves quickly from that point onward.

However, while this approach introduced me to the language I found my ability to pace through the book as I normally would with other programming languages hindered by the author's organization. Unexplained code is used in almost all of the examples before you get to its respective chapter. While this approach may work for some and give cause for thinking, it gave me an unnecessary headache.

Don't get me wrong, it did teach me a good bit about Perl, it inspired me to install Debian Linux on my programming workstation, and left me to pursue Perl. Despite this, I turned to Learning Perl. I found Lemay's writing to be too verbose and the organization of the book a bit of a twister.

Overall, it can be summed up by the following pros/cons:

~ Pros
- Good introduction to Perl
- Independent of Operating System (Great for Windows users ready to Learn Perl and perhaps Migrate to Linux for programming purposes)
- Solid examples and references
- Covers more advanced topics later on

~ Cons
- Verbose
- Awkward structure. Things such as loops are constantly used in beginning examples without much of an explanation. If you don't' have any experience with programming, it will give you a headache. The sections on these devices come much later, and have a strange introduction as well.
- Frustrating at times when it shouldn't be (IE, having you use functions that you haven't learned, or haven't been mentioned, in an example for a particular chapter)

Additionally, I'd recommend picking up Learning Perl or using it instead. I picked up Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, learned what I could, and then fell in love with Learning Perl's concise, straight to the point chapters and examples (albeit with a fair amount of humor). If you're a Linux/UNIX user, you'll probably find Learning Perl a better catch, but for me, Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days was the stepping stone to Linux and Learning Perl. Overall, I'm satisfied with my purchase. .