Rating:  - Beginning Perl really is an excellent resource for anyone looking to learn the language
Beginning Perl really is an excellent resource for anyone looking to learn the language - novice to expert. Even if you have absolutely no programming experience, the book starts out from the beginning by covering not only things you will need to know to learn Perl, but also good general programming practices. If you are an expert programmer, the book is written in a way that makes it easy to scan through and pick up on some things that you may not know or refresh your memory on some things that may not be completely clear. The index in the back is also great for use as a reference. Nothing can compare to the usefulness of a good Internet search engine (see Google) for use as a reference, but the book does quite a good job. It is nice to have something tangible in front of you to walk you through some tutorials and build up your knowledge of the language in a methodical way.
Personally, the book has helped me to become comfortable using Perl to do "everyday tasks" (everyday in the context of an obsessive computer user), perform my necessary job functions (manipulating massive text files), and become a better programmer. I used to know next to nothing about Perl, although I did have a solid background in other languages. With this book, and some help from the Internet, I was able to become a sufficient Perl programmer within a week.
Perl is a great language that every person in the computing field should know. There's literally hundreds of great tutorials and books on the subject that will suffice, but I would stress the value of having a well-written book sitting in front of you while you learn. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn Perl.
Rating: - Great for Teaching Perl
I use this book to teach Perl in a university course. I feel it does a very good job at exposing just enough of Perl to make it useful without confusing beginning students. I chose this over O'Reilly's Learning Perl (also a good book) because this book goes into References, Modules and a bit of OO Perl, and also has what I feel is slightly better treatment of shortcuts like $_ as well as lexically-scoped variables with 'my'. O'Reilly has broken these topics across two books (Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl), both fine books but I only want the students to have to buy one book. I feel that Perl is not very useful without references, so that was the major reason for switching to this book for a beginning Perl course. I highly recommend it.
Rating: - Very good book for beginners
I had no idea what Perl was when I bought this book. After a week of reading, I was able to write basic scripts and perform a variety of tasks. I am not a developer, and do not plan to become one. But I am always curious about how to do difference things. This book will not make you a super Perl programmer, but it will teach you all the basics and then some.
Rating:  - Good Tekkie Stuff
I've yet to really dig into this book, but it looks very promising. So far I am not disappointed with my purchase.
Rating: - Excellent book for beginners. Don't look any further
I have several years experience in programming, but I didn't know anything about Perl. I bought this book because of the good reference I read in Amazon, and they weren't wrong. The authors do a great job describing with a very simple and direct language all topics. The book is full of examples, and practically after each paragraph there is some code you can try in your computer. All the code in the book works fine, there are no errors and if you don't want to type it, you can download it from the Apress web site. The explanation of every piece of code is clear, simple and enjoyable, you can't get lost.
I give 4 starts to the book because the chapter where describes how to download the DBI, CGI and other modules, it didn't work for me, and this is the only part of the book I found a little confuse. In order to download all the modules you need, simply follow this rules:
- Type "ppm" in the command line
- Type "install DBI"
- Type "install CGI"
- Type "install DBD-mysql"
- And finally type "quit"
As well you can downloads from the "apachefriend" website the complete installation of Perl, MySql, etc. All these process is very straightforward and you are ready to go.
The second reason why I didn't give 5 stars is because I was expecting an appendix with the references for the most common methods of the CGI module to create HTML tags, but it doesn't have anything, just what is in the chapter and that is not enough.
This is definitely a book for beginners (just like me) and I strongly recommend it. I enjoyed my experience studying with this book, and now I want go further with a more advanced book. I wish the authors could write a second episode of Perl.
|
