Customer Reviews

Mastering Perl 5 (Mastering)

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

If you are not familiar with UNIX and would like to develop a dynamic site running on a Windows based server this book will help you!

A day before I bought this book, I thought that PERL is spelled PEARL. This should give you an idea of how much I knew about it. I also had no knowledge of programming.

Since I started working with the Internet, I needed a set of tools. I always associated PERL with UNIX, but after hearing about PERL for Win32 I got interested.

About 20 hours after buying this book I had my web site talk to my database. I did not copy examples from the book. I wrote the code to do what I needed it to do.

It would be great to sit down and read the book cover to cover and then start development, but time is of the essence. I jumped to the section that interested me the most, which is the very last section in the book. When I needed more details I went back and found the details. The book works well as a "How To" as well as "Reference".

When I needed additional information I emailed the author. To my surprise, I got a response next day!

I highly recommend this book!

This is a very good book for self starters. I am pretty impressed by the way topics are organized. However, it has several bugs, specially in the examples. So be careful. This book even touches some advance concepts like CGI, Win admin, registry, email handling & databases which I think are enough to get you going. I recommend it to every Perl enthusiast.

I have no programming experience at all, NONE!, ZERO, ZILCH! I have tried other books (mostly C books) and they have lost me almost right away. But with MASTERING PERL 5, I am on my way to programming oneness =) I have had it for just over 1 week and I'm already typing up code on my own (be it simple code).

I highly reccomend this book, especially if you are a newbie, like me.

That's all, now stop reading these stupid reviews and buy the book!

This book does a good job of being both a tutorial and a language reference. If you know very little about programming I think the "Dummies" book would be a better starting point. But if you know a little something about programming this would be a better book to get. It is tutorial in nature but covers a lot of things that the "Dummies" book never gets to.

Book is excellent. I left programming 10 years back (I knew only BASIC and Cobol then) and this book made me very comfortable with Perl. Writing style is very smooth. Doesn't indimidate at all. You can buy this book cheaper in India (you may be surprised that it sells for US$8 in India).

From beginning to end, this book guides you from the most basic Perl fundamentals all the way up to the point where you're a wizard of the language. This book is THE single source for learning everything you'll want to know and then serves as an excellent reference when you're done.

I have given Eric Herrmann my permission to use this note to him as a review in my name at amazaon.com.

Jens goal on using this note as a review was and I quote:

"The end result, though, in my opinion, should be to let programming idiots like me who get thrust into this postion know what will serve them best, which is buying this book and no other book." ...

Just a note to tell you how very much I enjoy reading your book.

I'm an absolute geek at programming (I know nothing) but suddenly my cgi (perl) writer evaporated and so I decided to learn this language myself in order to complete the projects at hand - following the wise man's saying: If you want something done and done properly, do it yourself.

I bought any number of books for beginners and intermediaries and read them all - I bought Mastering Perl 5 too but didn't touch it at first because it was so big. But, even though the other books gave me an idea about what perl is and what programming is and what cgi programming in perl is, I really didn't understand anything until I started reading Mastering Perl 5.

I'm only on page 191 now but I feel confident that, once through, I will become the best cgi (perl) programmer there ever was - or at least almost.

By the way, I am now on page 311 in your book. I have an excellent understanding of why things do what they do in perl so far and what is possible but given this understanding I am confident that I will be able to write the first neccessary script by the end of this week.

Thank you.

Jens Kristjansson Reykjavik Iceland

This is well written and useful for both the seasoned PERL Programmer as well as the beginner. It covers all materials and is laid out in an effective manner making looking up information extremely easy. One of the best programming resources I've come across to date.

Hi, my email to the author is already in the review section but I wanted to report that after some months I still have the book on my desk as a must have perl reference. It is a very useful book and I refer to it often even though I consider myself a pretty decent perl programmer now. Re the reviewer below who is obsessed with some typo's I think his conclusion is way off the mark. I don't think I've ever seen a programmers book without some typos somewhere .... |=))

This is the best Perl 5 book ever. I never could figure out what a thingy was. This book makes reference and object oriented Perl understandable. It also has a full chapter on regular expressions. The other books just don't have enough examples. This book must have 20,000 lines of code in it, and it worked just fine for me.

The other thing I like about this book was it makes Perl easy to understand on a Windows computer.

If you want to learn Perl 5, really learn Perl 5, buy this book.