Customer Reviews

Pro Perl

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

One of my arguments with Perl, which ironically is one of its strengths, is that it is such a powerful language there are perhaps thousands of things that you will never use, or not even know about that the language can do. Once a language relegated to scripting-use only, it has developed over the years into a full-featured language around which applications are being developed from. For example, there are numerous front-end web applications that are built around Perl not to mention in my own line of work we use a number of Perl applications to process and manipulate incoming data. The little kid has finally grown up and matured!

In Pro Perl, the author takes you through an in-depth analysis of the Perl language from the beginning topics up to advanced topics (including a relatively new one for Perl, Object Oriented programming). Many Perl books have a habit of either showing you the basics, and leaving you yearning for more; or showing you advanced topics that you are left scratching your head wondering "How did they jump from A to Z with no in-between"? In Pro Perl the author has taken an approach of explaining the concepts and walking you through the introduction and leading you to the more advanced topics without breaking it into distinct pieces of beginning, novice, etc. The book can be considered more of a instructional reference manual more than a code-snippet type book, which many programming books are nowadays.

One of the benefits this book offers is that throughout the book there are multiple reference charts and tip sidebars that either give you information on a syntax or available options, or lead you on to find more information elsewhere. Personally, I find the reference charts valuable as the author does not leave you guessing what all the available options or for a particular command or syntax -- in essence, he is opening the door for you to explore further on your own by showing you other possible roads.

This is a great book for those comfortable with programming and new to Perl, or those who have used Perl in the past but perhaps wanted to see what else it could do for them. The only thing lacking from the book is an indexing system on the side. It would have been great if you could have just flipped the book open to the appropriate section when you are on those fast-fact-finding missions.

I think this 1000 page book would make a fantastic 500 page book. I think the information provided is first-rate, but there much repetition and wordiness -- that it makes it a little hard to wade through.

I think it could be the "the best" Perl book, but it needs serious editing work to get it there.

But, whatever you want to know about the Perl language, you can find -- it's just a matter of wading through the verbiage to get there.

I'm only up to page 140 and there are numerous code errors. Some examples:

1) There is a reference to "Appendix A" but there are no appendices in my copy.

2) p 139: he suggests that the expression "\[1, 2, 3]" will return an array reference, but this is actually returning a reference to a reference to an array, using 2 levels rather than 1 level of indirection. This wouldn't be crucial except that this is the section of the chapter/book in which he is specifically explaining references.

Further, while there is a link to submit errata, there is no link for a place to view/download them. Other reviewers have mentioned the frequency of this kind of error.

This book would be a very bad source for someone truly new to perl.

This was a wonderful purchase. I didn't want to spend a whole lot of money so I decided to go with one of the used book versions to save some money. This seller was wonderful, the book was in great condition (much better than I had expected), and the service was terrific, quick and hassle-free. The book, itself, is just what I wanted. It doesn't cover all the topics one might want; but I needed a single reference that I could keep near one of my work sites where it wasn't practical to have several references on Perl. This book is exactly what I had hoped it would be; a really good, quick reference for most of the things I need.

This is a very comprehensive book for those who want to learn the Perl language from the ground up. The author does an excellent job of being detailed without being repetitive or writing at too basic a level. Intermediate users of Perl can find a lot here but even a novice will find sufficient explanation to allow them to learn the language from scratch. The book is well organized and starts with an introduction to Perl followed by how to acquire and install Perl. From there it goes right into the meat of the language with variables, operators, data types, interpolation, substitution, subroutines, regular expressions, working with files and directories, etc. Besides the language itself the author deals with some of the common administrative tasks like adding new modules and packages. The book ends with some advanced topics like embedding Perl and dealing with processes, signals and threads, and networking.

At 990 pages this is a massive book that is easy to follow and full of examples to show exactly how each concept should work. Pro Perl is highly recommended to everyone from the complete novice to advanced level Perl programmer and includes a lot of detail that I have spent hours on the Internet looking for before.