Customer Reviews

Discover Perl 5: With CDROM

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Where Learning Perl or Programming Perl gloss over the details important to the beginner, such as reading a file, performing an operation, then outputting to a second file, this book answers the questions that you have when you start. If I had depended on Learning Perl and Programming Perl without this book, as a beginner programmer, I would have been VERY frustrated.

This book explains the main features of perl in a readable and enjoyable manner. This is not an advanced perl book, but it gives a good overview of regular expressions, basic CGI manipulation and enough syntax to get you started writing perl scripts. For those who do not have the patience to read through the obfuscation characteristic of perl gods, the Barkakatis do a great job jumpstarting you on the learning curve.

The author took less then 400 pages to give a very in depth discovery of Perl 5 while other books took twice as much. There is a section called the discovery center that is like a pocket reference. The book uses lots of visual diagrams to describe esoteric Perl syntax and symantics. For example the description of the @_ system variable is most simple and complete comparing to several other books.

I wish this were the first Perl book I bought. My first book was Ellie Quigley's Perl by Example, the previous edition. That book was so dull that it had almost exhausted my motivation to learn Perl. When I was about to give up on Perl, I saw this one. From the cover to the index, it is a very friendly book. It was a joy to study it. It has helped me clear my initial negative impressions and I ended up a big Perl fan. The coverage is also very good. Although I have done a lot of Perl programming now, I still find it useful. The reason for my not giving full five stars is that some claims on the cover are a bit inflated. But overall, if you are like me, a person who needs a warm welcome to a new language, this is the book to buy.

Provides excellent review of basic Perl 5 usage from beginning to end. Easy yet comprehensive read for experienced programmers (C and UNIX shell programmers will find Perl an easy learn), and probably a good place to start with Perl for novice programmers. If you plan to use Perl heavily, you'll want to graduate to something more comprehensive after you finish this book.

This book had plenty of short examples. I would type in the examples, run them, and then make minor modifications to learn by practice what these modifications would cause on the output. The book showed Windows 95 and NT examples which some books don't. Unlike some programers, I don't have photographic memory so some repetition in this book was good for my learning experience

Good solid foundation. Not enough advanced examples, specially for regular expressions.

I liked this book quite a bit. I'm an experienced C++ programmer who wanted to get some information on perl. It was a quick read with excellent organization & extras such as PERL on CD-ROM, tear-out cheat sheet, chapter highlights in "Discovery Center", etc... After reading the book, I'm ready to move onto something more advanced but am glad to have the foundation I gained by reading this book.

Anywayz, author very often repeat the stuff he said before... forexample he wrote that "#!" uses to run perl compiler in UNIX three times in his book..., so it is for beginners or dummiez...