Customer Reviews

Learning Perl (Nutshell Handbooks)

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

 

 

I had to learn Perl in a big hurry to keep my job. Now I am a web expert with Perl being my favourite. This little, simple and easy to read book is still my favourite, and has been borrowed by most of my friends. This book is undoubtedly a "winner".

Perl is an absolutely marvellous language for helping system administrators in their task of handling multi-vendor machines, and is an excellent aid to increasing their laziness by helping replace cumbersome shell scripts with elegant programs.

This book by Randal Schwartz brings the novice to Perl programming up to speed quite gently, and shows off the power of Perl in a clear cut manner. As a precursor to the book "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall, the founder of Perl, this book is very nice. It starts with the simple Hello World program, and guides the user through the preliminary stages of Perl as it increases the capability of the program. Another nice point is the presence of exercises at the end of each chapter, challenging one to work out the programs and the bugs - an essential ingredient to learning any computer language. It also helps that Randal provides answers to these exercises.

I recommend this book and its companion volume, Programming Perl, very highly.

Let me preface my mentioning that I am a professional c,c++,unix,AWK programmer (Not to toot my horn, but to give the reader a point of reference). I stared reading at 10:00, an was writin' some small programs by 11:00. It had a lot of simple, but useful examples (I don't mind if the author uses his/her name in examples, Kind of makes it a little more personal) I have read many BAD computer books. This is not one of those. I was able to learn from this book, and that gives it a BUY IT in my book. (I enjoyed it)

Randal's book is the first thing one should purchase for learning Perl (hence the title.) His style is light but informative and he tells you the things you *need* to know. I made the mistake of starting with Larry Wall's "Programming Perl" (another essential book but has the power to ward off neophytes!) and realized I had to Do-re-mi it and "start from the very beginning....a very good place to start." If Randal comes out with a new edition which covers the greatly revised version 5 I'll bump the rating up to 9.5!

Perl is the most widely used scripting langauge for the World Wide Web and Randal L. Schwartz is a wiz when it comes to providing clear consise explanations for this coolest of langauges. If you are serious about configuration management, or getting data from forms on the World Wide Web, you owe it to yourself to start Learning Perl with this great guru!
For sanity's sake though, skip chapter 1 until after you've read through chapter 7.

Perl is an outstanding tool for programmers who have to get the job done fast and efficiently. This book is a must have for anyone doing programming in a UNIX environment. This is the language of choice for CGI programming due to its unique pattern matching and text substitution capability. Looking forward to the sequel!