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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, April 2, 2005
This review is from: Pro Perl (Paperback)
In the introduction, the author says:
"Programmers who already have some experience in Perl will discover things they didn't know in the chapters that follow, but can nonetheless safely skip this introduction."
I remember thinking that was a bit cheeky. I'm no Perl expert, and I'm sure that there will always be things I could learn, but still: that just felt a little boastful to me.
Well, I hadn't even got half-way through the third chapter before I realized how wrong I was. I kept muttering "Really?" while switching away to test something I just hadn't known before. That surprised me (pleasantly, of course).
I wish I had this when I first picked up the Camel Book. The Camel Book's author's are just too smart and too clever: I didn't understand most of their Perlish puns and witticisms when I first read it, and still find many of them difficult to grasp today. Peter Wainwright, however, puts things out the way I like to learn, with sensible and illuminating examples that really demonstrate what's happening, and he takes the extra time to explain it in plain English too (and that's why there are so many pages in this book).
The danger for someone like me in a book like this is the natural tendency to skip quickly through what you think you already know. If you've been dabbling in Perl for a few years as I have, there WILL be a lot you already know, but as the author promised, there's also plenty that you probably don't. I picked up quite a few useful bits in almost every chapter and have promised myself to go back and re-read to find the things I shouldn't have skipped over.
In the review copy I read, there still were some unfortunate typos that might confuse someone completely new to Perl. I hope those will be fixed before the actual publication. None of them bothered me, but they could be bad for someone starting with no experience at all.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not pro, just introductory, May 19, 2005
This review is from: Pro Perl (Paperback)
Why? Why do we need another book on Perl that walks through the syntax basics. In it's 1,000 pages this book finishes with Object Oriented Perl. And it spends at least four hundred on the language basics.
Why? Why couldn't this be the 'Pro' book the title describes. This is hardly pro at all. CPAN is given very short shrift. And in general, it's just a rehash of the topics covered in Programming Perl. And Programming Perl is the definitive source.
I'm really not sure why this book was necessary. It does have a different style than Programming Perl. It's a little less jocular and a little more mechanical. Reminiscent of books on Java, C# and Python. It is well written and illustrated.
I'm giving this four stars because I think it will work better for some folks than Programming Perl. Though I think everyone should start with Programming Perl.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
bulking up, May 24, 2005
This review is from: Pro Perl (Paperback)
Remember when Perl was a nice little scripting language? One that you could master in a few days. The success of it led to the incorporation of many new features. Most important of these being perhaps the ability to write object oriented code. The sum total of these features causes a blurring of a difference from "full" languages like C++ or Java.
While it is still possible to program using much of early Perl, this book's aim is to educate you as to the new material. Yes, Perl's scope is now impressive. What with a comprehensive regexp, bidirectional pipes, Unicode and more. How much of this to take in from the book is up to you. Thankfully, the chapters seem mostly independent of each other. So at this level, you have random access, which means you don't have to read all of the book. Each chapter, however, has a strong narrative sense of progress. You should read a desired chapter end to end.
A little irony here. Remember claims by some early proponents of Perl that you could skip the complexity of C++'s STL, for example? Or, more recently, to avoid the bulking up of the class packages in standard Java. Perl now has the same symptoms of success.
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