Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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33 of 33 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 30 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 usefulI 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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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Above Average Introduction, August 14, 2005
Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days by Laura Lemay is sufficient for the beginner wanting to learn Perl, be it on Windows or a UNIX-based operating system. If Perl is your first programming language, then this book is a fairly good book to choose as a starting point. It teaches the basics of programming in Perl and moves quickly from that point onward.
However, while this approach introduced me to the language I found my ability to pace through the book as I normally would with other programming languages hindered by the author's organization. Unexplained code is used in almost all of the examples before you get to its respective chapter. While this approach may work for some and give cause for thinking, it gave me an unnecessary headache.
Don't get me wrong, it did teach me a good bit about Perl, it inspired me to install Debian Linux on my programming workstation, and left me to pursue Perl. Despite this, I turned to Learning Perl. I found Lemay's writing to be too verbose and the organization of the book a bit of a twister.
Overall, it can be summed up by the following pros/cons:
~ Pros
- Good introduction to Perl
- Independent of Operating System (Great for Windows users ready to Learn Perl and perhaps Migrate to Linux for programming purposes)
- Solid examples and references
- Covers more advanced topics later on
~ Cons
- Verbose
- Awkward structure. Things such as loops are constantly used in beginning examples without much of an explanation. If you don't' have any experience with programming, it will give you a headache. The sections on these devices come much later, and have a strange introduction as well.
- Frustrating at times when it shouldn't be (IE, having you use functions that you haven't learned, or haven't been mentioned, in an example for a particular chapter)
Additionally, I'd recommend picking up Learning Perl or using it instead. I picked up Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, learned what I could, and then fell in love with Learning Perl's concise, straight to the point chapters and examples (albeit with a fair amount of humor). If you're a Linux/UNIX user, you'll probably find Learning Perl a better catch, but for me, Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days was the stepping stone to Linux and Learning Perl. Overall, I'm satisfied with my purchase.
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