Programming Perl (Paperback)

by Larry Wall (Author), Tom Christiansen (Author), Randal L. Schwartz (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
The second edition of the Camel Book is more than 600 pages long and full of excellent instruction and sound advice. Topics include all the good stuff from the first edition plus Perl 5 features such as nested data structures (ever made a hash of arrays of hashes?), modules, and objects. From "Howdy World" to making your own modules, this book has it all.

Product Description
Coauthored by Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, this book is the authoritative guide to Perl version 5, the scripting utility now established as the programming tool of choice for the World Wide Web, UNIX system administration, and a vast range of other applications. Learn how to use this versatile cross-platform programming language to solve unique programming challenges. This heavily revised second edition of Programming Perl contains a full explanation of Perl version 5.003 features. It covers Perl language and syntax, functions, library modules, references, and object-oriented features. It also explores invocation options for Perl and the utilities that come with it, debugging, common mistakes, efficiency, programming style, distribution and installation of Perl, and much more. Reviewers have called this book splendid, definitive, and well worth the price.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 670 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly; 2 edition (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565921496
• ISBN-13: 978-1565921498
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (133 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #217,213 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Badly Organized, but a Great Reference, February 3, 2000

By	Dan Budowski (Israel) - See all my reviews

The book itself, used as a Reference and for mastering Perl, is a five star book. But there are a quite a few disadvantages:

1. The book is not intended to the ones who have no programming experience at all. The read should be at least an intermediate programmer, because the basic programming concepts of the language (Variables, Subs and etc..) are badly explained.

2. Because of Perl's C Like Syntax, it is recommended that the reader will know C, Awk, or Grep and Some experience in the Unix Environment.

3. The Book itself is badly organized, certain complicated things are shown in examples and explanations, and those things are taught many pages afterwards. For Example: An Example of a perl program is shown on page 10, and that example contains subs and pattern matching, which are taught 100 Pages later!

These are the 3 Main Disadvantages. For Conclusion, if you're new to programming, or want to learn Perl easliy, buy "Learning Perl", but if you're a somewhat experienced programmer, and want to master Perl, this book is the best one you'll find for that purpose.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A "don't have to" read, May 30, 2000

By	joe_n_bloe (Ester AK USA) - See all my reviews

The official reference for the Perl language did not improve in its second generation. The original "purple Camel" is, in my opinion, a true classic where books about programming and programming languages are concerned--I rank it right there with The C Programming Language, Anatomy of Lisp, Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, and so forth. It was a classic because it was filled with lucid expressions of the thoughts of Perl's quintessentially pragmatic creator, Larry Wall. It was a classic because it provided a literate and thoroughly reasoned counterpoint to arguments in favor of more formally based languages and programming styles.

But ... somewhere in the extensive revisions, additions, extensions, and deletions that transformed the first Camel book into this, the second Camel book, the magic went away. And some very suspicious stuff went in. The book lost its digressive, essayic feel and became more of a perfunctory reference work. Additionally, some of the completely new material turned out to be just a little ... strange. The discussion of object-oriented programming based around the term "thingy" just doesn't do it for me. (Ignore all that and read Damian Conway's book instead.)

Preferences of style and tone aside, an unavoidable flaw of an infrequently-updated book like this one is that it inevitably refers to an obsolescent version of Perl. If you want current Perl documentation, you need to read the man(ual) pages that came with that version of Perl. What's in this book is generally but not completely accurate for newer versions of Perl. And because it's intended to be a more or less complete reference covering even small details, it can't help but be dead wrong on some points as the language continues to evolve. Bear in mind, also, that much of the material in this book comes STRAIGHT from the man pages. (Just not the up-to-date versions.)

A third edition is in the works, which will no doubt be at least a temporary improvement. If the newer version restores the insight and charm of the original, it will certainly deserve a place on your programming bookshelf. But as a reference work intended to cover a constantly-evolving language, Programming Perl will always suffer by being out of date.

If you are the type who dislikes reading electronic documentation, by all means, buy a copy of this book. But you'll find that you have to use the online documentation anyway.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Reference Book, February 5, 2000

By	Rak (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews

This is an excellent companion to the Learing Perl book (also by O'Reilly). If you are new to Perl like I was not too long ago, then start with the Learning Perl book first before you touch this one.

This book is intended to serve as a reference as it tackles the more complicated aspects of Perl. If you start learning Perl with this book, then you will find it a very difficult language to graps. However, I do not want to take anything away from this book. This book is fantastic for those who want to dive into Perl a bit more and have passed the beginners level. I purchased both the books and once I had finished reading the Learning Perl book, I started turning to this book to get a better understanding of things, especially regular expressions.