Customer Reviews

Perl for Dummies (Second Edition)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I am copying an excerpt from "The Perl Journal" review of this book.

__START__

Summary: This is a really rotten book. Very few books are able to attain as many as eight major flaws:

1. 'Dummy' approach encourages and reinforces the reader's disability

2. Lack of concrete programming examples

3. Lack of general discussion of how to program, apart from language-specific features

4. Reference manual organization style

5. Inclusion of too many useless and abstruse features

6. Complicated explanations where simple ones are possible

7. Scaremongering and panic instead of calm explanation of affairs

8. Many, many technical errors, some very serious

__END__

I taught myself Perl with little programming background (BASIC, 20 years ago). I started 1 1/2 years ago and am now using it daily as a web developer and data analyst.

Learning Perl from the books and resources out there is *extremely* difficult. There were many times I could've saved 3 weeks of hammering on a script if a perl guru had said, "Hey, list context just means the function wants a list, like an array or hash." I understand very well that the O'Reilly books are godawful for a beginner b/c that's where I started and suffered long from every explanation that said simply, "It's just like in C, so we won't explain it." That said, the books are pretty terrific once you're at a level to absorb them, but steer clear before then, unless you already know everything that POSIX means.

It might be tempting to pick up this book b/c there are pretty much no Perl books for those who haven't coded already. You should consider "The Elements of Perl" instead of this one. It's a better start for beginners and a wonderful way to start to understand Perl, its idioms, its culture, and how to program well. There is also "The Perl Black Book" which is a much better overview of the Perl than any single O'Reilly book, though the author isn't a guru, he's a good writer and tackles everything from the basics to advanced stuff with lots of examples and a CD with all the code.

Perl is wonderful, so please do pick up a book, just not this one.

For those who frown upon Dummies books, you should ease up a bit and give this one some serious thought. Perl for Dummies is strictly for beginners. When I say beginners, I mean people with absolutely no programming experience in any language. I compared this book to Learning Perl and found that Learning Perl is written primarily for seasoned non-Perl programmers who are trying to learn Perl for the first time. If you are like me, with no programming know how, this is a more appropriate beginning. It explains such simplicities as scalars, arrays, adding and removing list elements, conditionals, etc. It even goes (lightly) into CGI and regular expressions. It does so in a language which understands that the reader is a "dummy" when it comes to programming and most importantly, it keeps it simple. Simplicity is the primary teaching strategy when dealing with a topic at the novice level, and Perl for Dummies does this well. The weakness of this book is that it does not do a good job of teaching you how to install Perl from the CD provided. In fact, the instructions provided were downright wrong. I had to ask a Perl programmer how to install and run Perl programs on my Windows 98 system. Another weakness, if you can call it that with a book at this level, is that it lacks program examples which would allow me to see what exactly can Perl do in the real world, such as system administration in a UNIX environment. I recommend this book as the starting point, with Learning Perl and Elements of Programming Perl as your next logical step. After you have mastered these books should you go on the Programming Perl and the Perl Cookbook.

As always, you have to be very careful with the 'Dummies' line of programming books, as most of them turn out to be terrible. This one however, is terrific. It did a great job of simplifying the sometimes arcane syntax of Perl, and explaining (at least at a beginner level) how some of the Perl features differ on Unix systems and Win32 systems, and even on Mac systems.

No, the book won't teach you everything; a Dummies book shouldn't be held up to that. When I was done with this one, I moved into the O'Reilly books to go further with Perl. This book will get you going in Perl much better than the O'Reilly Perl books of fame ('Learning Perl' and 'Programming Perl'), though. Popular opinion says everyone should be able to learn Perl from scratch from the O'Reilly books and that's just not true. They are colder, more rigid texts that will do fine when one is more advanced with Perl.

I've only come across a couple of great 'Dummies' programming books, and this is one of them ('Active Server Pages for Dummies' was the other). Get over yourself - you're not too cool for a Dummies book. Buy this one.

This really is the best book I know of for learning Perl, and I say that as someone who owns a very large pile of books on the subject. I first bought it when I started a year of full-time Perl programming, and it was the book that let me get up and running. Some years later, I *still* go back to it occasionally--there are some things that it just explains better than other books do. (In particular, it does a good job with some of the occasional dark corners of dereferencing arrays in complex data structures. If you know what that means: there's some weird syntax to this that this book gives very clear examples of. If you don't know what that means: trust me when I say that this book will tell you how to handle it without requiring that you completely understand why it's hard first, and that's a VERY good thing.)

If you're already an experienced programmer, you'll do fine reading the introductory material in Larry Wall et al.'s "Programming Perl," but whether you're an old hat at hacking or not, you'll get plenty out of this book. When you're up to speed, your next book should probably be "Programming Perl" or Nigel Chapman's "Perl: The Programmer's Companion."

For the non-programmer wanting to learn Perl, this is THE Book to read. The author is knowledgable and able to transfer that knowledge in a concise and entertaining way.Several other supposed "entry-level" Perl programming books left me frustrated, but this one brought it all home for me.If you need one book to get you started learning to read and write Perl, buy this one.

I've never been a big fan of the "Dummies" line of books because I've had some bad experiences with some of them. This book was a pleasant surprise. I wanted to learn Perl for doing CGI on the web, and I wanted to learn it quickly. This book did not dissapoint. I used it as a starting point and then moved on to the O'reilly books, which was an excellent way to do it. Here's the funny thing, I still go back to this book as a quick reference at times. There have been times that I have not been able to find the answer quickly enough in the O'reilly books and I've ended up turning back to this one. I just had one of those occasions where I quickly found a small section in this book on concatenation. It gave an excellent example. After sifting through O'reilly for a couple of hours, I wish that I had looked through this one first.

With a good amount of work and concentration, you should be able to learn Perl with this book. Think of it as a starting point, because it will not likely teach you everything that you want to know. That's not the purpose of the dummies books.

In conclusion, I'm very happy that I chose this book as a starting point.

Having been almost completely stumped by trying to learn Perl using the camel, I was desperate to find something that would make it a bit easier to get started. This book was just what the doctor ordered. True, there were no excercises, but I could dream up my own without much difficulty. I would have given this book the full five stars as a starter for Perl (at least for someone like me who has programming experience; non-Perl, non-C, but still) if it hadn't been for one thing: Doesn't anyone proofread these things? It's bad enough when there are irritating t7pos in the text describing things, but when the little sample code snippets have errors in them, that's really bad.

That said, the book made me realize at the first glance when the code was bad, so it definitely taught me something. And now I feel ready to go back to the camel again.

This book was not up to the 'Dummies' standard, in my opinion. Perhaps because PERL users are so diverse that hitting on all the various wants would take too long? I found this book lacking in substance. That is, you could finish this book with no real feeling of competence in basic PERL scripting. I strongly suggest "Learning PERL" instead.

This book seems to follow the pattern of most Dummies books I've read...give a good overview of the major considerations of the topic at hand, provide a few examples to help give the reader a feeling of empowerment, and indicate that there is much more to learn.

I came to this book needing to learn perl well enough to write some simple text modification programs for work. While this book does not replace a semester-long university course on the language (which is what I'm used to), it does give the reader enough information to jump in and start writing some simple perl programs...if your comfortable with the OS you're dealing with and if perl is already installed (I'm not sure I really could have accomplished those tasks with only the knowlege from this book).

I guess my take on this book and other Dummies books are like those infamous Cliff Notes from high school...simply reading these books won't make you an expert, but they can give valuable insight and pointers that you might not easily gain on your own. As an additional tool coupled with a little bit of programming experience and the provided perl documentation, Perl for Dummies has helped me get up to speed quickly and complete several important projects...which I don't think I would have been able to do otherwise.

This book is a very good introduction to Perl. If your goal is to program CGI scripts, however, you will need an additional book. The chapter on CGI uses incomplete examples which cannot be run as-is. This is a change from the previous chapters which provided working examples. To parse incoming data, the author says you should use a perl module called CGI_Lite. But he doesn't tell where to get it, how to install it, or how to set it up and use it. That's not too helpful, especially for a beginners book. You'll need to know some Perl before diving into CGI programming, and this book can give you that base knowledge. Just don't expect it to give you everything you'll need to know to get cgi scripts up and running.