Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself...in 21 Days) [Paperback]

Laura Lemay (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0672313057 | ISBN-13: 978-0672313059 | Publication Date: March 23, 1999

Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days will cover the basics in the first few chapters, and then move to practical uses of Perl and in-depth discussions of more advanced topics. Later chapters will also delve into software engineering topics, with discussions of modular code and object-oriented programming. CGI will be covered in one chapter, but will not be the focus of the book. Teach Yourself Perl will rely heavily on longer working examples and code, as opposed to small snippets and code fragments. Each chapter will include two to three smaller complete examples and one major one that illustrates most of the concepts for that chapter and builds on the chapters before it.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A great book for beginning programmers who want to learn Perl. Filled with concrete examples and, yes, by using this book you will be able to write good Perl code on your own in 21 days. But no perlson is an island, and there is no single book that covers Perl completely, so we recommend that you also get Programming Perl, which is better at providing the language specifications, and, in fact, was written by the author of Perl. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From the Publisher

Perl is a powerful and convenient tool for manipulating text, generating reports, performing system tasks, and programming the Internet. This book introduces new and experienced programmers to the world of Perl and teaches all major aspects of this powerful programming language. - No previous programming experience is required

- Explores the old and new features of Perl and Perl 5

- Teaches Internet programming with Perl 5 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 720 pages
• Publisher: Sams (March 23, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672313057
• ISBN-13: 978-0672313059
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,796,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I think that lot of people need perspective..., March 16, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself...in 21 Days) (Paperback)

...when buying books. If the book says "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 days", any advanced topics that it covers is gravy. Obviously it's a beginners book. Some of the complaints I've read are just silly. "Don't buy the book because Lemay got a math formula wrong" (if you know what the right formula is, great. She's not supposed to teach you algebra too!), "don't buy the book because when you're done learning everything that the book has to offer (which is substantial) it won't turn into a super advanced book" (go buy one of those 2000 page tomes that tries to please everyone and only succeeds in breaking your back). No book can please everyone. However, if the book clearly lets you know that it's a beginners book, and you insist on complaining that that is what it is,... duh?

I orginally bought this book because I had a need to write a script to connect to a db. I found out that perl could talk to dbs, so I decided that this would be a cool way to learn perl. So I tried to find a perl book that talked about connection to dbs. Unfortunately, the few books out there that talked about this assumed you were an expert in perl and had no time to teach it to you. So I realized that I needed a good, quick foundation in perl.

I dusted of my perl for dummies book. Now this is a true beginners book. Way too lightweight! This book will not prepare you for perl code that you'd see in the "real world". The important part is, THIS BOOK WILL! The greatest thing that an author can do for you is give you a spoon so that you can feed yourself. This book does that.

By the way, this book has a lot of topics that I haven't seen in "advanced" books. Don't think that it's a lightweight. The author does cover enough material so you can educate yourself afterwards. I probably have about 40+ technical books, and this is one of the better ones.

As someone who makes a living developing web apps, I need to be able to learn new stuff QUICKLY and get projects done. This author helped me greatly in this regard.

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent reference for years, March 30, 2000

By 

Travis Cottreau (Wellington, New Zealand) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself...in 21 Days) (Paperback)

I bought and used the Teach yourself Perl in 21 days for Perl 4 and found it extremely useful

I am an experienced programmer with C, Pascal and awk, but a few years ago, I was prepared to do a project in Awk and a fellow programmer recommended that I look into Perl, since it was becoming popular on the web.

I picked up "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days" and quickly grew attached to the language.

The plusses of the book:

-it's well laid out day by day for people just starting out.

-Someone with a little more experience can skip most of the the first week and get right into the heart of the language.

-It has a useful index. While not perfect, the index lets you get to most everything.

My copy is getting ratty, I've used it so much in the last few years. I think anyone who knows another procedural language who wants to learn perl should get this book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a little too harsh in previous review, October 31, 1999

By 

J. Park "JP" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself...in 21 Days) (Paperback)

I wrote a review of this book previously and I feel that I did not point out some really worthy aspects of this book. First of all, in contrast to the vast majority of Perl books out there (including "Learning Perl" by Randal Schwartz), this book covers Perl for both Windows and the Mac, not just Unix.

Secondly, the book does not hold itself out to be a complete Perl book. Instead, the author's stated goal is to provide a gentle introduction to Perl to get you to an intermediate level and the book definitely does do that.

In going through the typos of this book, I realize that most of the code typos are in the Regular Expressions section where errors are very easy to miss.

Finally, when I wrote my first review, the website for the book was not fully operational, but I visited the site again and it now appears to be working fine.