Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Perl 5 in 21 Days (Teach Yourself in 21 Days)

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

...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.

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.

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.

I knew nothing about Perl and bought this book because other Amazon reviewers said it was good for newbies, and I found that to be true as well. In contrast, Randal Schwartz's "Learning Perl" book, which I flipped through in the bookstore, is just too hard for a complete newbie. However, the book falls a little short when addressing Perl's more advanced functions and features. The "Going Deeper" section found in each chapter is easily the most annoying aspect of the book. In each "Going Deeper" section, the author touches on some interesting and advanced features of Perl without going into any depth or providing code examples. Get this book to learn Perl but get something more advanced so that you can actually use Perl for something useful.

Also, there were way too many typos in this book. It's difficult to get rid of typos, but a programming book must be free of typos in its code examples otherwise the reader does not know whether his programs are crashing because of his own mistakes or the book's typos. Some reviewers state that some typos are inevitable in any book with lots of code examples. I disagree. Anyone providing code examples should test and debug it before publishing it. I wouldn't want my name on a book which had buggy code because of typos, so I don't see why any professional author would do the same.

I went to the book's website to list some of the typos but aside from the home page, the rest of the website has not been constructed. Hopefully, the author will get around to finishing the website so that readers can post where typos can be found and the author can provide errata pages as well as correcting mistakes for the second edition.

I actually have an earlier edition of this book entitled simply "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days." I cannot vouch specifically for the current version, but if it is anything like the one I have, I recommend it to anyone who's trying to learn how to create their own scripts in Perl. The book I have does not go into integrating scripts with the web (which is all I use Perl for), but apparently this new version does. It's a great book for beginning programmers. In fact, this is the first language that I really learned and did so primarily from this book. It takes you step by step with many examples through just about every aspect of the language. I still use it as a reference when trying to debug scripts!

TEACH YOURSELF PERL IN 21 DAYS was the first book I bought on the Perl scripting language. While it has no claims above being an introduction to the material, it has got quite a lot of information packed into its 720 pages. I had no background in Perl at all (though I already knew several other CS languages and scripts), but with this book I had no trouble picking it up. I was able to learn a fair amount of knowledge in a short amount of time. The layout of the book is quite helpful and organized; people with no background in Computer Science can start from the beginning with no trouble, while those readers who already know most of the fundamentals can skip ahead to the later chapters.

This book will teach you almost everything you will need to know as a beginning Perl programmer. It starts with the basics (the ever-present "Hello World" example, operators, variables) and slowly moves to more in-depth topics (such as hashing, lists, strings, loops and subroutines) until finally getting to the harder stuff (file I/O, CGI scripting and references). TEACH YOURSELF PERL IN 21 DAYS won't give you everything that you will ever need to know, but it will definitely fill in almost all of the blanks that you need to know most of the time.

As a book for beginners, this book should have everything you're looking for. It also makes a fairly good reference guide once you've managed to establish yourself as a Perl programmer. I'd advise buying a second, more advanced book, once you're ready to move onto more sophisticated topics. But as an introduction, this book will cover practically everything you will need to know. Recommended.

Without a doubt, the single best book I have ever read. I read this book 5 years ago before the Internet buzz took off. I had no programming and little computer background. This book taught me the basics of what I needed to know to become a top programmer (over 500 of my scripts and programs to date that appear all over the Web). I have read over a dozen other Perl books and this is still my favorite - easy to follow, clear examples and logical progression. It is neither overwhelming nor intimidating rather an enjoyable and educational read.

A key thing to keep in mind in a lot of these "teach yourself" book reviews is what the background is of that reviewer. For anyone WITH a formal or extensive software background, the book will flow easily. For those WITHOUT a structured software background, don't expect to be a programming whiz after this (or to get a lot of the nuances of the language). The book covers PERL, but not how to write good pgms. The book gets into terms and constructs, even early on, that would baffle a newbee. It also greatly disappointed me that the author DOESNT COMMENT THE CODE AS THEY RECOMMEND! Yes, it is explained in the text, but if the code was commented in the examples themselves, it would be a much better book. Web references are helpful (ie code examples are on-line). I would say it is best used by someone already with a software background looking to cross over to PERL. (BTW: workable in doses of 1hr per day/chapter, more if you really want to grasp examples and play with code on-line.)

This is a good book as an introduction to Perl progamming. I have used it as the textbook for my Perl class for two semesters and have found it to be effective. There is no particular emphasis on CGI; rather, this is a book about Perl as a general programming language. It is also not, by any means, a reference book. Complimented with "Programming Perl," you'll have all you need to get started.

Good points:

* Chapters are just the right size for learning.

* Laura Lemay is a good writer. Her style is easy to read and she takes the time to explain new topics.

* Quizzes and exercises test your skill and suggest programming assignments.

Bad points:

* There are a few typos in the examples that need to be fixed, particularly in the regular expressions section. The vast majory of examples are OK, though.

* Doesn't get into object-oriented Perl much.

This book is both an outstanding tutorial of the Perl language as well as a rather comprehensive reference book to keep on your shelf. I think I was writing productive scripts in 3 or four days and actually optimizing useful software within a week. Using this book as a reference, I've learned more about CGI than I'll need to know in the next five years. Great BOOK!