Programming Perl

Because the Perl community is both knowledgeable and active the language covers a lot more ground than it did at the time the last edition of Programming Perl was published. Even if you have both previous editions you'll want this latest version--if only for the new jokes. --Steve Patient

Reader Reviews:

Not If you want to learn in a hurry (1/1 people found this helpful)

This book makes good bed time reading, but it is no good for learning in a hurry. The book contains humorous comments and anecdotes, but these are just annoying to someone trying to learn in a hurry. The book is structured for somebody who wants to write a compiler for perl rather than a user of perl. Chapters often contains vague references to other chapters of the book that are difficult to follow, and end up in a dog eared book as you continuously search for references.

The idiomatic english is probably not suitable to non english speakers with technical english.

If your serious about Perl then get this book! (1/1 people found this helpful)

This is the first book I read on Perl and I must say it was absolutely excellent. It gives a thorough understanding of the language and is a vital reference for anyone who is serious about Perl.

It doesn't receive the full 5 for me though as inexperienced programmers may struggle with the content. If you don't have much programming experience I would suggest Learning Perl as a starter then move on to this book.

Essential for lovers of Perl culture, recommended for the rest of us (2/2 people found this helpful)

Perl seems capable of evoking both rapturous adoration and abject disgust from those who are exposed to it. If your feelings are closer to the former than the latter, well, you probably own this book already, and you love it.

After all, The Camel consists of the God of Perl and two Perl demigods writing the definitive reference about Perl from top to bottom. What's not to love? In particular, if you've ever heard Larry Wall give a talk, you'll be able to spot his contributions: droll, parenthetical and punning.

For those of us who just like Perl (or even just have to work with it), it's not quite as essential as you might have been led to believe. In part this might be because the third edition is getting on a bit, and plenty of other good Perl books have emerged in the intervening time. And in part, it's because definitive tomes such as this one by definition contain large chunks that you don't need, where you'll spend most of your time just nodding and thinking 'yep, I already know that'.

But of course, there's always a few bits you didn't know, and that's where The Camel comes in handy. The first part of the book, which goes over the core of the language, is a must read in this respect. To be honest, I didn't find the explanations to be quite as cogent as what can be found elsewhere (e.g. Perl Best Practices or Advanced Perl Programming), but it's all in one place here.

In addition, beyond the core language, lots of other material is present, including: threading, details on Perl's internals, and a long list of Perl idioms and dos and don'ts. There's also the reference section, which covers the built in functions, and briefly outlines what's in the standard packages that come with Perl, which is also helpful, although in most cases I expect an internet search (or the perl man pages) is just as fast, and in the case of the standard library, provides more information.

On the one hand, I think you can get by without owning this. On the other you will not regret buying this book -- Perl has enough quirks that it's nice to have The Camel close to hand. Nice, but not essential.

THE reference, but not to begin with... (5/6 people found this helpful)

This book is an in-depth and comprehensive reference about Perl Language. Despite some depreciative comments I've seen around, it is very well written and is a joy to read.
I didn't give it 5 starts because I started with Perl with this book, which was not such a good idea, Learning Perl (or a similar book) might have been a wiser choice. Nevertheless It's not impossible to start with this one, specially if you already program using another language, just don't get lost in the middle of all details about some specific issue.
You might spend more time than you wanted to start writing some usefull program but after you write it the book gives all you need to know to unleash the power of Perl.

Impress everyone with regular expressions (9/18 people found this helpful)

I have to admit that before using this book I used learning perl. However everything that I learned in the first book was in the first chapter of this book. I'm very impressed with the layout of this book. Beverage time I turned a new page I found something else I had to try. One paragraph in chapter six prime outlines the whole reason for really wanting to use pearl.

"Perl doesn't just glue together other computer languages. It also glues together command line interpreters, operating systems, processes, machines, devices, networks, databases, institutions, cultures, web pages, GUIs, peers, servers, and clients, not to mention people like system administrators, users, and of course, hackers, both not be in nice. In fact pearl is rather competitive about cooperative."

This book is well designed to get you off the Ground and hit the deck running. I doubt that I can give it enough stars.

Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant

Editorial Review: