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
...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.
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent reference for years, March 30, 2000
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.
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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
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.
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