Customer Reviews

Perl Black Book

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Perl Black Book is probably the best technical book I have ever read. This book will save you time through its organization, concise explanatory style, and content. The "Black Book" enables a programmer to quickly access information, especially keyword syntax. Each chapter begins with an overview of what will be covered including page numbers for "immediate solutions" to those problems you need a quick answer to. I don't know how many times I have spent more time than I would like sifting through pages of text looking for the correct syntax for the 'if' construct, or playing back-and-forth with the glossary trying to locate a specific function to manipulate a string. This book will help you find answers quickly. The book covers nearly every major aspect of beginning/intermediate level Perl programming in a consistent, fluent, and well-organized manner. Regular expressions, cgi programming w/ Perl, OO, and Perl/Tk are all covered. If you have an understanding of the basic elements of programming, this book serves as a valuable reference, and helps to further explain and clarify some of the more difficult aspects of the language without being too verbose. This book does not provide very many references to additional information, however.

This is a fantastic perl book. It is very complete, well written, and organized in a "problem solving" fashion that makes it a valuable reference tool. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because in some areas the author doesn't provide quite enough detail about the BASICS that make the code work. I wouldn't recommend this book if you are an absolute beginner to programming, but if you have any experince at all, you should do just fine with this book. Buy it, you won't regret it.

I just started learning Perl and wanted a good reference that wouldn't talk to me on the level of Perl for Dummies but also wouldn't go so high that it was pointless. I wanted real-world examples and a lot of information on data structures. This book is amazing. I've had several rather obscure questions that it has answered perfectly and a rather large amount of confustion that the author cleared up nicely. He gives great examples and walks the reader through Perl from "Hello World" to a CGI database and interacting with windowing systems (Tk and Windows). Absolutely required for a serious library.

My experience with Perl is fairly limited. I'd written several CGI scripts with the help of Elizabeth Castro's Perl/CGI For The World Wide Web, but as my needs advanced, I soon found myself yearning for a more complete reference guide.

This book proved to be just the reference that I needed. You don't want to purchase this book if you are just starting out with Perl. But it covers everything from basic programming concepts to regular expressions to advanced concepts in 1280 pages. It is the perfect reference guide for a semi-experienced Perl hacker like myself.

The O'Reilly books aren't bad ("Mastering Regular Expressions" is a must-have), but I find myself reaching for the Black Book first whenever I have a question.

After having used PERL for a few years I found the old books on my shelf were lacking in some information I wanted. I was spotted looking at this book one day and received it as a gift. I am delighted to add this to my shelf, and only wish I had bought it myself so I could have had it earlier.

Please understand that there are planty of great PERL books out there (O'Reilly comes to mind), but this book encompasses with one book what it would take to get from 4 or 5 other books.

I consider this book a MUST BUY for anyone wanting to learn PERL for whatever reason. This book rekindled my interest in PERL and I find myself using PERL more than before.

I recently bought this book and since then my knowledge of PERL has increased several times. Not only does this book go into detail about every single function in PERL (I think...at least the ones you would actually need in a lifetime) but it does it in a good way. On average, each function gets about a page or 2 (popular ones get a lot more). Compare that with other PERL books...1/2 a page. "Wow" was the first thing I said when I read it.

It is also very organized. The author slowly takes you through the basics until you understand, and then he walks you through the more advanced stuff.

A must-buy!

This book is simply amazing, it is probably the best PERL book I have ever used. Almost any question you have about PERL can be answered in this book, from creating TK apps, IPC, OOP, and OLE Automation. The only thing that I wish was included that is not is info about creating WIN32 COM Components, but other than that it is perfect. I use PERL at home, work, and school, and this book goes with me everywhere! (I need a hardcover edition though! Mine is taking a beating!)

This book is very comprehensive and provides fairly in-depth coverage. It has one VERY SERIOUS flaw.

Throughout the early part of the book, the author continuously makes references to future sections and chapters in his explanations. Every page or two there are examples that use concepts covered later in the book, which is very confusing to novices (I unsuccessfully used this book in a class I taught). I think it is unacceptable for an author to include "(see Chapter XX later in the book)" sometimes twice per page! This reflects a failure to tackle the challenge of how to "get a foot hold" on the information, how to organize the topics in general. Why confuse things by using topics covered in future sections/chapters? Why use regular expressions when introducing loops? I think this really detracts from the quality of the book. I bought it based on the recommendations by other reviewers, and frankly, because of this, I am disappointed.

The author also has this ongoing supposed to be "cute" story about an imaginary dialog with a "PCC" which adds nothing to the book and is annoying. These can easily be skipped by the reader, but why include them? The book uses enough trees as it is, without this dumb nonsense.

In sum, a complete and in-depth reference with a problem using "see Chapter XX" that prevents me from giving it a higher rating.

I've had several people ask me to recommend a book to get them started on Perl, and this is always the first one I suggest. It has great examples and while it may take you a few seconds to scan through the table of contents or index to find what you're looking for, it's certainly worth it, rather than having to scan several books to find what you're looking for. It probably isn't the best book for a person who has never programmed before, but if you at least know of basic programming concepts (when to use a loop, that variables are used to hold things, etc.) this book is an excellent resource. The book starts at the basics of installing, then advances through the obligatory "hello world" and text formatting to more complex things such as database calls, so it can be used by both a beginner and a more advanced programmer.

The book is mostly examples, followed by explanation and preceeded with a "conversation" between the novice programmer and the programming guru. It highlights the "new" code, drawing attention to what it is you're learning for the section, and explains what it does.

While I am prefer O'reilly books, I have found that The Perl Black Book has replaced my O'reilly Perl books and is the only Perl book I really use.

When I discovered Perl, I was a C++ programmer. I wanted to more easily manipulate textual data, and let's face it, cgi programs are just not the happenin deal when it comes to web apps. Enter Perl. At the time I bought this book, I had seen a ton of Perl scripts doing what I wanted to do, but Perl as a language seemed so foreign to me. The Black Book bridged the gap wonderfully, and it is so well written that I managed to read most of it on a car voyage from Louisiana to California (I can't even read some of my favorite novels while traveling).

The book makes learning Perl a breeze, and it comes with a CD to check out any mentioned code you want (thought there is tons of code in the book anyway). The book and CD have tons of real world scripts that you can learn from and apply to the projects you are most probably already working on. I loved this book, and I think anyone who wants to learn Perl shoul start here.

Bottom line: Probably a better learning book than reference book (although it is still a good reference), this book made Perl easily accessible to me.