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

Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours (2nd Edition)

Perl for Dummies (Fourth Edition)

Perl Books

Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours (3rd Edition) (Sams Teach Yourself in 24 Hours)

Format: Paperback
Author: Clinton Pierce
ReleaseDate: 15 June, 2005
Publisher: Sams
Rating:

study the chapter on hash
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Pierce gives an updated introduction for Perl, describing the latest version 5. [A review of the 3RD EDITION 2005.8. Though realistically, if you are new to Perl, you'd be doing fine even if the book didn't reach up to that version. Perl is a very stable, mature language, which is probably what you want.

If you already know another language, then many or all of the concepts in this book will be familiar. It just becomes a question of plowing through the chapters, to learn the Perl syntax.

In Pierce's presentation, he quickly takes you to what Perl calls a "hash". In Java, the corresponding class is a Hashtable. Regardless of terminology, the idea is a very useful one, and if you intend to be a proficient Perl programmer, you need to have this down pat. Earlier material in the text, like scalars and arrays, are pretty trivial to understand and use. The hash table is trickier, but Pierce does a good job in conveying its usage. He avoids the maths theory behind this, but points out that it gives you quick access to a value associated with a key, where this access is not proportional [ie. linear] to the number of keys in the table. He doesn't actually say it's logarithmic, which it is. [For the theory, Cf. Knuth "Art of Computer Programming" vol 3. ]

Learn the hash. Experienced programmers [in any language] already know its value. In all of the book, it is the best glimpse into advanced algorithmic coding.

How to get your hands dirty quick
If you are a complete newbie to programming, this book is not for you, because it takes a "focus on the trees, ignore the forest" approach. As with the other titles in the Sam's Teach Yourself xxx in 24 Hours series, this book aims at quickly arming you with enough knowledge of Perl to start programming in the language in no time. In other words, you are thrown into coding right away. There's no high-level discussion of data structures and programming gotchas, etc. There's a lot of stuff crammed into each lesson, and some of the lessons will likely take more than an hour (and more than one pass) to understand. While this is not a reference at all, and many subtle details are omitted (which is actually a bad thing in the long run because Perl is such a complicated language), the book does get you started quickly. A lot of practical examples are given to show you how the language works, and many of the snippets included can be used in your actual programming endeavors. For example, you can take the code to find unique elements in a list as is and use it without any modification (save for using your own variable names).

If you already have some programming background and need just one book to learn Perl quickly, this is the book for you. After this, I'd recommend the "camel book", i. e. , "Programming Perl" published by O'Reilly, which gives a forest-over-trees treatment to the language, plus it contains a useful reference on the language.

To be honest...not that great.
First, you sit on the bike and place your feet on the pedals - in the beginning of the book, you slowly learn about variables, arrays and how Perl programs are constructed. Reading this book is kind of like riding a bicycle for the first time. So far, everything's doing great. You're understanding everything that is being said to you, then all of a sudden you get pushed down a huge hill going at a very fast speed. Before you know it, you crashed. That's how it is reading Clinton's book. The beginning is great - great introduction and you start to feel your confidence grow as you tell yourself, 'I can do this!' After Chapter 5, everything goes chaotic. Clinton slams difficult tasks in your face without providing any answers or solutions to his exercises. After every chapter, there is a quiz that gives you around 3 questions and answers about the chapter you just read. The book then provides you with very difficult exercises that have no solutions provided for you. I felt very lost and disorganized on some chapters that describe regular expressions and filehandles. The author has two different chapters on files - one for filehandles and one for opening, reading, and writing files. That was one of the most common sense things Clinton should've done: Kept all the file(s) information in ONE chapter instead of spreading it out between 2 chapters that are half length of the book away from each other. Another problem that kept arousing were his code examples. A lot of his code included extra garble that was not necessary for successful completion of the program. Also, a lot of his examples did not work properly. On one of the other chapters that discussed databases, Clinton wrote an database look-up program that you could look up people by their e-mail address or phone number. The problem with that was you couldn't add any people to the database using his code and I had to modify it extensively to get it to work. I had to get help from other sources throughout that chapter and throughout his book to accomplish the tasks.

I will tell you that I did learn the fundamentals of Perl using this book, but there were many, many times that I wanted to throw it against the wall. I highly recommend two books instead of Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours. For people who want to learn Perl and learn it well, check out Randal L. Schwartz & Tom Phoenix's 'Learning Perl 3rd Edition' by O'Reilly publishing. That book creates an amazing foundation to master Perl AND provides answers to all the exercises. People who would like to learn the basics of Perl with extensive CGI programming, check out Jacqueline D. Hamilton's 'CGI Programming 101: Perl for the World Wide Web. ' Jackie's book is an amazing piece of literature that provides you with great coding examples that work and are understanding. She even updates her website daily to update her code and add great new features to it.

Both books are great priced and are a more reasonable alternative to Clinton Pierce's book. If you have a solid programming background, then you might get through this book in a breeze, but if you're a beginner, leave the copy on the bookshelf.