Customer Reviews

Perl Core Language Little Black Book: The Essentials of the Perl Language

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I normally don't get much from books, due to their typical lack of practical examples, or any examples at all. This book is packed with examples. The explanations are also a superb compliment to these most excellent examples.

I wouldn't NOT suggest this book to anyone who has never programmed before. This book is better suited for people with programming experience or intermediate Perl skills, but need a great reference and practical example book. This book is also great for those (like me) who, up until now, have only learned enough to get your projects done, and need to fill in those gaps. It's also great for refreshing your mind, when you haven't done something in a while.

I can't stress the amount and quality of useful, practical examples in this book. If the explanations and descriptions aren't enough, the examples certainly are.

Again, if you've never programmed before, this book is not for you. Coriolis puts out a much larger and elaborate book named "Perl Black Book" that would probably be better suited for you.

If you're serious about your Perl, you MUST get this book.

The first Perl book I've seen that is truely great for beginners, great for people who are already Perl programmers, has a lot of example code, is a great reference, has a good reference section, and also seems to not leave any important details/sections out. The fact that it is very well organized/divided is definately a plus! Any person who wishes to learn Perl or have a great reference, MUST have this on their bookshelf.

I write a lot of code in perl. My primary workstation is a linux box. So while I also develop code in perl, I administer my system in perl. I have O'Reilly's entire bookshelf on Perl (except the Gecko [win32] book). This book is a welcome companion to them. It's written a little differently than youre used to if you have a steady diet of oreilly (as i do). I dont think its meant to be read straight-through as the oreilly books are. Rather this book provides a good reference. Sort of a phone book -- you wouldnt use it to find out how the phone works, but rather to look up a number. I bought this book in a larger set of perl books, and definitely recommend it.

a final note to this: the description on how to program in CGI, while a little sparse, is easy to read, and made my first forays into CGI programming a breeze (reading perldoc CGI was an absolute bear!).

In a line, buy this book if you want to start programming in perl

I started reading this book 5 days ago, and I already consider myself a perl programmer. I am a computer engineering student at Stevens Institute of Tech and my main focus of study is network security from a programmer standpoint. After a couple of days reading this book, I could already create simple client/server applications. In addition, I learned how to handle files in numerous ways, and how to work with their content "you will be amazed how easy this is done in Perl" and even formating text, creating DBM Database files etc. Object oriented programming is very well explained and finally CGI scrips are also very well presented "with lots of security warnings." I would give this book six stars if I could since it does its job VERY well! My extensive programming experienced really helped me in the reading process, but the language and examples are so clear that even newbies in programming could assimilate the content easily!!! You can contact me at rarmente@stevens-tech.edu if you have further questions.

I think this is a great reference book for perl. It covers all the major topics with examples on each of the minor details. Chapters are divided by topics such as hashs,arrays,cgi. Excellent reference. Biggest draw back is sometimes the examples are too short so that it becomes difficult to figure out how it would operate in a large program.

This is a combination of reference and learning. I would not advise this for a person trying to learn PERL as their first language, but if you already have a grasp of C++, Java, VB, Python or some other complex scripting language then this is ideal. So we do not have the first three chapters explaining what a program is. There is a useful rip-out card with most of the syntax. PERL is full of obscure symbols and patterns such as $_[0] or $] or even /^((\((\d{3}\))? ?\d{3}-\d{4},? *)+$/ (which locates a telephone number). The book explains them concisely and provides reference tables which are useful after you have mastered the fundamentals. If you want a more gentle entry then something like "PERL and CGI for the World Wide Web" by Castro will lead you in a more 'human' way. It's excellent, but after you have been through it it will be placed on the shelf - it's not a reference document. If you want lots of complex examples so you can play round with pre-existing code then look at "Mastering PERL 5".

PCLLBB (plus the rip-out card) is the book I keep within arm's length. The blank pages at the back I have written in as a secondary index to the tables. Incidentally the index is good. The only problem (as with all indexes) is if you do not know what you are looking for. For example, to remove a line feed you use chomp() and you can look up truncate, line feed, substring etc and not find it. This is where you need your own index!

Perl is a kitchen sink kind of language---it is huge. It is also a superb language for certain purposes. Some programmers will want to learn the "entire" language, but perl is so flexible that it is worth learning even a little of the language for occasional use. I need to use perl as a CGI interface between a database and some web pages and for little else. As such I use it occasionally. When I do, this book is at my elbow. The core language is covered thoroughly, logically and with practicality. I know of no other book that makes it so easy to work with a "difficult" language.

Be warned that perl is much more than its core language. There is a huge library of modules that help with many different types of applications. This book covers very few of these modules, but it coveres the basics of modular use. Books twice the size of this one will still only cover a fraction of the modules out there, so I don't see that it is worth looking for a "more complete" book. My own use of perl has me using this book and the O'Reilly book on the perl DBI interface.

I own both the "Camel" and "Llama" books, and SAMs learn Perl in 21 Days- but this is the best one so far. I bought this more for a refference (and they had a 25% off sale on Tech books that day :-), but have used it exclusively ever since. This book is VERY informative and I would recommend it for beginners as well as people familier with perl. Perhaps the best quality of this book is that it does not assume you are programmer already. So the beginner can pick it up at chapter one and go from there. The experienced perl programmer will also find this book very handy and it mill most likely not leave his side.

I've been planning to learn Perl for a long time. But most of the Perl books out there are either too advanced (esp to ppl with less/none Unix exp) or poorly organized. After I got this book, I actually learnt to write a real world program for my work in a week! One feature of this book is it's well organization. It present you little chunk of problems and solutios. Perfect size for an impatient ppl like me :). Excellent job! Thanx Coriolis

I found this title extremely useful in learning perl mainly because it teaches you how to do 1 thing in 5 different ways. This allows the reader to chose whichever method they are most comfortable with. The book is also very well organized and explains everything in a language that even the best programmers have trouble with- English! Within a couple days, I found myself writing my own scripts in Linux.