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Average Customer Review
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
I wish I could sell it back on ebay, June 8, 2000
I don't know about anyone else, but I am so tired ofprogramming books with bad code, typos, and broken promises. Despitewhat this book says, you will not finish it as a pro. The only thing I really use it for is to look up built-in functions - but I can do that for free online...I wish I could auction the book off but the damned binding broke the first week I had it. I think anyone wanting to find a good introduction to this language should buy one of the animal books - this is a waste of money.p.s. Did anyone else have problems with the code in chapter 20 (web programming) ?
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Inefficient way to learn Perl, May 4, 2000
The author doesn't know how to write a book in a didactic way. He uses concepts in his examples without explaining them until later chapters. In the chapter where he finally attempts to explain something that he used earlier, he refers you back to the beginning chapters where he mentioned its use. His chapter on OOP should be skipped all together. His explanation of patterns is sketchie. His chapter on CGI programming is a poor introduction. The typos, grammar, and overall flow of the book demonstrate that he wasn't interested in spending the time to put some thought into the project. I have over 12 years of experience with C++ and other languages, and I think that this is one of the worst presentations I've come across in years. He really makes the learning process a lot harder than it needs to be. Look elsewhere.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Worst Perl Reference Ever, January 9, 2000
The book started off alright. Its discussions of variabletypes, subroutines, loops, etc. was mediocre to decent, however it'spretty hard to screw those up because EVERY beginner level book for ANY programming language is basically the same. When McMillan began discussing regular expressions, he seemed a bit lost himself, his examples were not concise and he went into little or no detail, then went on to say how IMPORTANT the preceding topics and examples were. From there it went from bad to worse, the examples were very simple until a certain point when he gives an email parsing example. I actually felt like I'd skipped a chapter! It was like, Where the heck did that come from. I had very little Perl experience going into this book and didn't learn much about the more advanced features of it, which is what I set out to do. If you can write a for loop in C, C++, Java or pretty much any language it's almost exactly the same. This one is a paperweight... It does make the bookshelf look good tho.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK, October 1, 1999
By A Customer
The examples are full of typos which will have you going crazy trying to figure out why it doesn't work. How can you learn a language when the material you are learning from is wrong!?!? Finally went and bought Perl 5 for Windows NT in 21 days. Now that is the book you need. Normally I wouldn't advocate anything with "21 days" in the title but this book is definitely the exception. But whatever you do, don't buy "Perl from the ground up" unless you like headaches.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Methodology is bad, examples are poor and buggy., May 2, 1999
The book does not meet its goals. It does not serve for interesting sequential reading and cannot be regarded as a reference either. Plus the examples are logically poor and full of bugs. Special shame to Osborne McGraw-Hill - don't trust their "Free Code online" bonus! The archive is highly incomplete so in order to understand buggy samples you'll have to type and fix them manually.
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Rough, but a different perspective, December 14, 2003
I found this book to be a great supplement to Learning Perl which is quite terse to rely on alone. Granted, this book is dated and has some typos, but also has very good examples and wording is clear.
Not a costly book since it's out of print-- well worth a read for the enthusiastic novice.
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Its true, May 11, 2001
The book cover boasts 'Open this Book as a Novice and Finish it as a Pro'. The book has excellent material on the fundamentals and examples that work. The language basics are easy to understand and implement. The book covers enought object oriented concepts to get you started. There is minimal coverage of regular expressions, so get outside reading on this powerful Perl feature. Open this book, and write code that works.
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Typo Nightmare, High "Huh?" Factor, January 24, 2000
By A Customer
Don't buy this book. Here's why: 1) It is full of typos. If you're new to Perl like I am, they'll make your head swim. 2) I read and re-read and read again the explanation of refereces and multidimnsional arrays on pages 48 to 53. I know less about that topic now than when I started.
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Good for reference, but badly written, September 27, 1999
By A Customer
Examples often don't work, and full of typos. It has a lot of reference info on it, but it is very poorly written. It makes 3 major mistakes: First, examples to some definitions have code that hasn't been explained yet. Very annoying because you don't know why the code works, and it's often paired with the thing you're trying to learn in the first place. Second, It often defines things in a "by the way" sort of way. You may be reading a particular definition, and then in the text, or in the example, you see something else defined. This is also very annoying, because it makes it extremely difficult to find that "by the way" definition again. Third, some things are glossed over, specially function definitions. Some function definitions just repeat the name of the function and offer no examples. This is very bad, because it forces me to buy another book, or find the definition on the internet.
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The book is an awful text -- too many mistakes!!, March 17, 1999
By A Customer
I'm auditing a class at a local college where this book is the required text. I've had to go through the examples and demonstration problems line by line to compile them and see if they work. Each of these should have been checked by the author. For new students this is very discouraging. I would not recommend this book as a text.
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