Beginning Perl, Second Edition (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

"Beginning Perl, Second Edition is a well-named text that starts exactly where it claims…This book is a fine place to start." — James Edward Gray II, Slashdot contributor

"...there are great examples, and projects assigned after each chapter to help you really understand and remember how to code in Perl." — Mark Spritzler, JavaRanch Bartender

"This book is a well-conceived introduction to Perl in tutorial form... A Very Good Book. :) :) :) :) of 5." — George Woolley of Oakland Perl Mongers

"The Perl (this book) teaches is strong industry-standard Perl that is…considered best practice." — Jack Herrington, Editor, Code Generation Network Originally created as a powerful text processing tool, Perl has since evolved into a multi-purpose, multi-platform language capable of implementing a variety of tasks such as system administration, CGI and network programming, XML processing, and more. Beginning Perl, Second Edition provides valuable insight into Perl’s role regarding all of these tasks and more. Commencing with a comprehensive overview of language basics, you'll learn all about important concepts such as Perl's data types and control flow constructs. This material sets the stage for a discussion of more complex topics, such as writing custom functions, using regular expressions, and file input and output. Next, we move on to the advanced topics of object oriented programming, modules, CGI programming, and database administration with Perl’s powerful database interface module, DBI. The examples and code provided offer you all of the information you need to start writing your own powerful scripts to solve the problems listed above, and many more. Whether you are a complete novice or an experienced programmer, Beginning Perl, Second Edition offers an ideal guide to learning Perl.

About the Author

James Lee is a hacker and open-source advocate based in Illinois. He holds a master’s degree from Northwestern University, and he can often be seen rooting for the Wildcats during football season. As founder of Onsight, Lee has worked as a programmer, trainer, manager, writer, and open-source advocate. Lee coauthored the recently published <i>Hacking Linux Exposed, Second Edition</i>, as well as <i>Open Source Web Development with LAMP</i>. He enjoys hacking Perl and has written many articles on Perl for <i>Linux Journal</i>. Lee also enjoys developing software for the Web, reading, traveling and, most of all, playing with his kids&emdash;who are too young to know why dad’s favorite animals are penguins and camels.

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 2 edition (August 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159059391X
• ISBN-13: 978-1590593912
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #67,779 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great for Teaching Perl, February 14, 2007

By	F. L. Fabrizio (Birmingham, AL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I use this book to teach Perl in a university course. I feel it does a very good job at exposing just enough of Perl to make it useful without confusing beginning students. I chose this over O'Reilly's Learning Perl (also a good book) because this book goes into References, Modules and a bit of OO Perl, and also has what I feel is slightly better treatment of shortcuts like $_ as well as lexically-scoped variables with 'my'. O'Reilly has broken these topics across two books (Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl), both fine books but I only want the students to have to buy one book. I feel that Perl is not very useful without references, so that was the major reason for switching to this book for a beginning Perl course. I highly recommend it.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beginning Perl, 2nd Edition, October 6, 2004

By	T. Barr (Mt. Prospect, IL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Beginning Perl, 2nd edition, by James Lee, et al., is a splendid
introduction to the Perl programming language, version 5.8.3. The flow
of the book is logical, straightforward, and highly readable. Text is
heavily sprinkled with program examples that the reader can easily try
out along the way, as well as exercises at the end of most chapters,
with solutions in the appendix. Chapters are short, clear, and
engaging.

After a brief discussion of the history of Perl and a listing of
numerous helpful online resources, the book quickly moves on to the
logistics of running a Perl program, followed by descriptions of basic
program elements and control flow. Then it's ahead to more
sophisticated data elements - lists, arrays, and hashes - and finally
functions and subroutines.

After a solid and seemingly effortless explanation of these "basics,"
the book moves to one of the most powerful features in Perl - regular
expressions - and how these can be used to access files and data. From
there, the discussion expands to string processing and references. The
book concludes with discussions of more "advanced" Perl features,
including object-orientation, modules, and use with webservers and
databases.

Regardless of topic, the writing style stays crisp, clear, and
example-filled, making this book a highly effective and enjoyable way to
get a jump-start into Perl programming for the novice or a quick
refresher for the expert wanting a Perl 5 update.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perl from basics to objects, October 12, 2004

By	Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is a very capable introduction to Perl that I think is intended for reasonably experienced programmers. It is not intended to teach Perl as a first computer language, and it does not pander to the reader. The Perl it teaches is strong industry standard Perl that is in line with what could reasonably be considered best practice. That's something in a language that prides itself on having many ways to do one thing.

The book covers the entire topic of Perl from the basics of writing a script, through functions, modules, and into object oriented programming. It also covers vital community information such as the use of CPAN.

If you have not read Programming Perl then I believe you should start there. But if you find that book has too much of a learning curve then I would recommend this book or Learning Perl (O'Reilly.)