Minimal Perl: For Unix and Linux People

by Tim Maher

No-nonsense and practical, yet with wit and charm. A joy to read.""
-Dan Sanderson, Software Developer, Amazon.com
""Shows style, not just facts-valuable.""
-Brian Downs, former Training Director, Lucent Technologies
""Brilliant, never tedious-highly recommended!""
-Jon Allen, Maintainer of perldoc.perl.org
""You could have chosen no better primer than this book.""
-Damian Conway, from the Foreword
Perl is a complex language that can be difficult to master. Perl advocates boast that ""There's More Than One Way To Do It,"" but do you really want to learn several ways of saying the same thing to a computer?
To make Perl more accessible, Dr. Tim Maher has over the years designed and taught an essential subset of the language that is smaller, yet practical and powerful. With this engaging book you can now benefit from ""Minimal Perl,"" even if all you know about Unix is grep.
You will learn how to write simple Perl commands-many just one-liners-that go far beyond the limitations of Unix utilities, and those of Linux, MacOS/X, etc. And you'll acquire the more advanced Perl skills used in scripts by capitalizing on your knowledge of related Shell resources. Sprinkled throughout are many Unix-specific Perl tips.
This book is especially suitable for system administrators, webmasters, and software developers.

464 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2005

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of examples and a good reference to have. I was hoping that "Minimal Perl" meant that I could get a lot done with only minimal perl skills, but it's actually a reference to the amount of code you need to write compared to traditional shell scripting. In other words, if it takes me 20 lines to do something with ksh, this book will show you how to do the same thing with 10 lines of perl. Great if your already familiar with the syntax and structure, but less useful if your just starting out with perl.

Also, the guy with the big pipe dies in the end.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The subtitle on this book is the important part: "For UNIX and Linux People". (It's a rather large, very verbose introduction to Perl for people who already know their way around the command line and the core Unix utilities.)

What goes around comes around; what made sense in 2006 might actually make sense all over again in 2019. This book was written at a time when it needed to convince hardcore Unix-users that Perl could do everything better. Now that Perl has come and gone as the hot all-in-one scripting language, it needs to win over the hearts of a whole new generation of people who are spending their formative years at the command line - very often SSHing into virtual machines.

Quite frankly, I don't think it's too hyperbolic to say that Perl only makes sense in the context of the Unix tools which came before it. When I first learned Perl from "the llama book" (Learning Perl) waaaaay back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I did not have that Unix context. But I was young and impressionable, so I didn't mind the weirdness.

Skip forward two decades (aaaah!) and I'm at a job where Perl is still alive and well. I decided it was time to get back up to speed with it (again). But I'm no longer so young or impressionable. Well, I liked the title of this book and Manning was selling the digital PDF for half price, so I took the plunge.

As it turns out, I stumbled on the exact right book for me! I've just spent the last five years or so on a strict diet of Unix tools. They're incredibly handy and you can get a lot done with them. But, let's face it, they have a hell of a lot of quirks. So you end up doing some tasks with Bash and other tasks with sed and a few specific tasks with awk and...that's a whole lot of rules and inconsistencies to remember (or man pages to reference).

So given that context, here comes Perl with a superset of all of those tools along with consistent syntax and - here's the big one: it's virtually guaranteed to already be installed on just about any Unix system you'll encounter. That's actually pretty compelling.

And for that reason, this book is a winner: if you already know Unix and you're looking for a painless total body and mind conversion to the ways of the Perl, this is the gentle introduction you've been looking for. There are tons of examples, copious explanations, and just a whole lot of book. The only downside is that it's a bit verbose and slow if you're already a seasoned programmer. There are also some questionable code "style" choices - but I found that to be easy to overlook. Joinnnn usssss.

[Noah Sussman]

I only actually read the chapters on command-line Perl, "perl as a better grep" and friends.

In fact, I only bought this book in order to read the chapters on command-line perl. And it was *totally* worth every penny, just for those chapters.

I'd recommend this Perl book to any developer who is interested in getting more done on the command line, in Mac, *nix or Windows.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is entertaining, very detailed, and filled with TONS of information. kind of heavy for a perl newb like myself - probably gonna have to come back to this one.

[Pete Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book on perl, and why to use perl as a replacement for sed, awk, grep on modern unices instead of trying to use perl as an implementation language.