Perl is a flexible, open-source, and widely accessible scripting language used by systems administrators and others to automate their daily tasks. "Perl Power!: The Comprehensive Guide" will cover every aspect of the most up-to-date version of Perl including scalar data, lists, arrays, hashes, subroutines, files, directories, strings, and much more. Technical topics are explained clearly and concisely and end-of-chapter projects encourage the reader to program on their own. A detailed table of contents and a complete, well-organized index make this book a great reference tool. All code used in the book will be available for download on the companion website.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Newbie Necessity - Start Learning Perl Quickly and Practically,
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This review is from: Perl Power!: The Comprehensive Guide (Paperback)
This is one of the best Perl books I've ever read as a novice. I'm not quite the newbie but still very, very green and this book has supercharged my Perl programming ability. I tend to approach the same topic from several different authors for a balanced approach so in this case I've read through at least 4 other Perl books.
What's so different about this book? The pragmatic code examples, clear explanations of code line-by-line, and the illustrations/visual examples of key programming topics. Some of the aims of this book are "...to make programming fun" and to "...provide certain advantages over the other books because it offers programs that tell or follow stories (or use cases). At the same time, efforts have been made to present verbose samples that emphasize language features in isolation. The code contains extensive commentary, and the book covers the code on a line-by-line basis whenever possible and supplements the commentary in the code files." Lest you think that means another dry, hard to read book...think again because isn't the same-old, same-old here. This is the first Perl programming book that I found hard to put down and I read every single page cover to cover. I am preparing to read through it again much more deeply...it's that good. It's the simplicity of the book. Dr. Flynt does an excellent job of using coding examples that really do something and really demonstrate the language. I learned a lot by studying the nuances of how he coded the examples in addition to the explanatory text about the code language and visual examples were great! I highly recommend coding as many of the examples as you can. As you do that after reading and studying the book and code you will find that you will naturally think about how to program solutions. Here's an example of what I mean. After using this book I was writing little example programs like passing a text file as an argument to my Perl script and loading it into and array and doing some funky splicing, joining, flow conrol, etc without a bunch of errors. It wasn't from the lack of syntax errors. It was because I began to truly understand the concepts in isolation (as the book sets out to whenever possible) and thus I was able to bring concepts together as a real working Perl program. My confidence just shot up a hundred fold and programming became more fun for me than it has ever been in my attempts to learn how to program. I can now write simple programs and the future is bright! No where to go but up from here. Now no book is entirely perfect. In this case, Perl Power was a bit irrating with mixed definitions in a couple of places. For example, on page 144 on the topic of the splice() function he defines the arguments you can pass to the splice() function. He defines the 3rd argument on page 144 in the text and in the visual example on the same page as the "number of elements placed in the destination array from the source array". Then in the code example on page 145, the text on page 145 and the visual example of page 146 he defines the 3rd argument of the splice() function as the "number of elements in the destination array that you want to delete" when you splice the elements from the source array into the destination array. Confusing for a beginner. After running the code and studying the second illustration on the splice() funtion you realize that the second definition given for the 3rd argument is the correction one. I believe there was only about 5 literal typo's in total and one of them on page 132 where he writes ... if (!defined ($NewArrayA[Itr])) => [Itr] should be [$Itr]. Aside from that all of the code ran perfectly and this books deserves 5 stars at least from me. I probably worked through about 90% of the code examples. There was maybe 1 other confusing definition scenario similar to the one I list above but I don't recall at the moment. I followed this book very closely and took my time because it was that useful to me as a beginning Perl programmer and programmer in general. Having read a few other Perl books as well I was able to appreciate this book's approach to teaching much more. I would like to point out topics areas that had great coverage but they all did. I especially like the chapter on Scalars and Formatting, Arrays and Data Containers, Control Statements and the chaper of Functions is one of the best chapters a newbie could read on this topic. The coding examples in that chapter just clinched this entire topic area for me. A must read. The other chapters were and are just what a new Perl programmer needs. This book will get you up and running with Perl quickly and EASILY and I stress EASILY. This book easily deserves kudos right up there with the more popular Perl programming books. To round out your beginning perl programming I recommend supplementing this book with 'Beginning Perl', Second Edition by James Lee and published by Apress. This book will cover additional areas that are useful to the beginner that Perl Power doesn't go into like use of the warning and strict syntax as well as introductory sections of Object-Oriented Perl, CGI and DBI. Now Perl Power doesn't leaving you wanting for much and the author says up front that his goal is not to bog you down with trying to get you to use Perl modules and the extended time and effort in getting these modules to work without really learning the Perl language and how to actually program with Perl. Perl Power in my opinion hits the mark with bulls-eye accuracy. The author's years of teaching Perl in the classroom really shines through in the book because the author delivers exactly what newbies need without leaving much to question. This is the good foundation. Once you've gotten Perl Power and Beginning Perl comfortably under mastery or at least with some practical know-how you'll want to keep the Perl Core Language (Second Edition, Little Black Book series) next to your computer for quick look ups and great examples that will keep Perl fresh in your mind and just a reference away. Perl Power will have you programming from YOUR OWN ideas and developing YOUR OWN solutions in short order. The other supplements I've suggested are only to help you have a good rounded approach to this topic. So go ahead and add this book to your Amazon shopping cart and checkout today!
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great perl book for newbies,
By Bike lover "God bless you~" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Perl Power!: The Comprehensive Guide (Paperback)
When I first learned perl for my bioinformatics project, I tried several different perl books such as for dummies or sams beginner books. None of them were even close to this book. Very well written by a teacher who knows what the students want, progmatic approaches, properly organized introductions to useful tools (such as DzSoft editor) and wonderul examples of real codes. This is a great beginner's guide, and will also be great even for who have just finished for dummies or sams beginner books. I cannot understand even how there are no reviews yet on this wonderful book.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Avoid it. Its good points are in the confusing bits it neglects to mention.,
By Christopher M. Nehren "Professional software ... (Levittown, Pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Perl Power!: The Comprehensive Guide (Paperback)
Yet another Perl tutorial? It seems so. I found this on Safari while reviewing the newest books available through the service. I had not encountered the publisher or author previously, and decided to give the book a quick review of key concepts, much akin to Schwern's litmus test for Perl books.
There's no confusion between $#array and scalar @array because, as far as my cursory look showed, neither are mentioned. Also absent are mistakes regarding processing the return values from localtime--also because localtime seems to be absent altogether. That seems to be a recurring theme in this book: rather than make mistakes typically found by Schwern's litmus test, this book eschews coverage of the topics altogether. One plus that this gives the book is that it conveniently neglects to mention that & sub exists (though it covers references but--shockingly--doesn't cover subroutine references) and that's fine by me. However, this leaves the reader with quite scant coverage of Perl. CPAN is barely mentioned, and in the same breath it seemingly establishes Perl as a commercial language akin to C# or Java. The thriving open source community surrounding Perl, the envy of every other language's community, bares no mention herein. For the novice and the Perl community as a whole, this lack of mention does a great disservice. External module usage is skipped entirely, as are so many other things. Last but not least is the contradiction in the chapter on regular expressions. This is the most serious error I found in my cursory perusal. In the first few pages of the chapter, the author describes the binding operator as ~=, with surrounding copy enforcing the description. I would have accepted a possible typo or Safari transcription error, but the surrounding copy that enforced the error removed all doubt in my mind that the author doesn't know regular expressions. There are actually code examples using this nonexistent operator. These examples could not possibly have been tested as-is, considering that they're syntax errors. To make things worse, the author adopts the correct =~ operator later in the chapter without any notice of the previous incorrect usage. This is very confusing indeed, and unacceptable in the chapter on regular expressions where precision and accuracy trump all other concerns. In sum, I found several reasons to not purchase this book with a cursory review. I'm sure that I would find more if I spent a greater amount of time with it. I hope this review reaches those who want to learn Perl and who are looking for a book to buy. Don't buy this one! Learning Perl by O'Reilly is the gold standard. You won't regret it. No, I do not work for O'Reilly, but I have the utmost respect for their books. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that this book uses the old style global filehandles. For a book published in 2006, this is unacceptable. Perl 5.6 was release in 2000. Get with the times! Lexical filehandles are orders of magnitude more maintainable.
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