Learning Perl by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy

Summary: Learn programing Perl with elementary book

Learning Perl is a typical elementary book. You can find there everything, beginner needs. You will be guided through the basics of Perl, elementary data types, structures and conditional loops. What this book reminds me is good old “The C Programming Language” by Kernighan and Ritchie. Authors of Learning Perl simply go step by step and present language specific constructs to the reader. However, this book is not for everybody. It is neither a reference guide, nor a “Learn by example” kind of book. It’s an elementary. You will be though Perl from the very basics and I am pretty sure this is great for people who begin their experience with Perl. What I liked within the book? Well, the “Some Advanced Perl Techniques” chapter – which is unfortunately very short, brought my attention. Another interesting part of the book was devoted to regular expressions, however I missed XML related examples and references. XML is quite important these days and to pass over it is strange thing for me. In general, I’d advise buying it to anyone who wants to learn Perl a consistent way rather than through “found in the Internet” examples. On the other hand, if you are looking for a reference or advanced book on Perl – try finding something else.

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