Beginning Perl

by James Lee

This is a book for those of us who believed that we didn’t need to learn Perl, and now we know it is more ubiquitous than ever. Perl is extremely flexible and powerful, and it isn’t afraid of Web 2.0 or the cloud. Originally touted as the duct tape of the Internet, Perl has since evolved into a multipurpose, multiplatform language present absolutely everywhere: heavy-duty web applications, the cloud, systems administration, natural language processing, and financial engineering. Beginning Perl, Third 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, the book moves on to the advanced topics of object-oriented programming, modules, web 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, Third Edition offers an ideal guide to learning Perl.

Genres: Programming

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[inner_loops · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first Perl book. After a few chapters and some googling I was able to write a few "real world" scripts/programs, so it does its job. My only real criticism is that it does too much hand holding; I'm not new to programming, so I found the explanations for basic programming concepts to be distracting. It's trying to be a book both for people new to programming and people who are experienced programmers but new to Perl. I think it would have been better just choose one of those.

It's a good book though, you'll come away with enough Perl to get stuff done. It just won't be your only Perl book, it's called Beginning Perl for a reason; there's a lot it doesn't cover.

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember it being decent.

[Kenn Lau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great book, lots of foundational examples, great to keep as a reference.