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Beginning Perl, 2nd Ed.
Beginning Perl is a conversational-style tutorial that will guide you through your first steps into the Perl world and even a little beyond. The first two-thirds of the book cover the basics of programming with Perl including data types, flow control and IO.
The casual flow through here will help prevent fledgling programmers from suffering information overload. The authors handle the need to provide enough information, though, by revisiting topics repeatedly, going a little deeper each time. Unfortunately, this hurts the volume's use as a reference, as it's quite a challenge to go right to something. (Example: The built-in join() is covered in the chapter on "Regular Expressions," which is certainly not the first place I would look.) The index is decent and can guide you through these problems, if you remember to start there.
In keeping with the book's tone, side-trips and diversions are fairly common. Early on, these center around topics like "How to Think Like a Programmer" and "What Exactly is a Binary Number." I mention this because I know some readers appreciate this level of detail, while the interruptions annoy others. I found many of the discussions insightful, but it did occasionally get carried away with itself. (Example: There is a whole page on Perl's versioning scheme that goes so far as to discuss what a "patch pumpkin" is. Interesting or not, it seems out of place in here.)
One of Beginning Perl's real strengths is its constant encouragement of the programmer in training to experiment as a means of further learning. The text often suggests things to try and each chapter ends with a set of exercises. Answers to exercises are provided in an appendix. The only way to really learn programming is to program, so I was glad to see this push in the right direction.
The final third of the book digs a little deeper, examining references, object oriented programming, the CGI protocol and interfacing with an external database. Make no mistake, these are only introductions, but they are a nice addition to a beginner's book that will have you doing a little practical programming quickly. The "Introduction to CGI" and "Perl and DBI" (database interface) chapters really stood out here.
Two chapters were rocky enough to mention. "Regular Expressions" does not handle its content well, I'm afraid. You spend most of the chapter seeing if a pattern matched, but not what it matched. That's an important distinction for me. Learning regular expressions can be tricky and you need to see exactly what's going on. This issue is finally address near the end of the chapter, but it needed to come sooner. True beginners will likely need considerable experimentation of another book to really catch on to regular expressions.
"Object-Oriented Perl" was also problematic. Frankly the chapter bit off more than it could chew and doesn't really manage to teach much because of it. (Example: Inheritance isn't even addressed.) I think a better use of the chapter would have been to outline only the use of objects as a setup for later chapters, leaving the creation of objects to a volume that could spare the space to do the topic justice. Again, beginners will definitely need more material to be comfortable with object oriented programming.
To summarize, if you've wanted to learn Perl but haven't yet taken the plunge, you could do a lot worse than to start with this book. It's a casual tour of the basics with a few teasers for further study opportunities.
You can purchase Beginning Perl, 2nd Ed. from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
According to the ISBN buried in the BN.com link, it's an Apress book by James Lee and Peter Wainwright. See GoPriceIt for more details. Or just go straight to the Amazon entry for the book.
EricI would actually consider Perl to be one of the best starting languages actually (unless you plan on going on to be a professional coder).
I learned Perl before any other language and found that the Llama book was a perfect introduction to programming techniques and Perl alike.
"All that glitters is not gold"
My favorite Perl book was the first one, published by O'Reilly, back in the 90's, by Randal. They've all seemed so dry since. :-\
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
There are also a lot of free resources out there to help you learn Perl without having to buy a book. The following website's tutorials listing helped me get started:
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node=Tutorials
YMMV of course, and you may very well wind up buying a book anyway, but still check that out!
This is a great beginner's book. And if you're a beginner with no cash it's an even better book, since the first edition is available as per-chapter PDFs. Get 'em here.
S2education is no substitute for intelligence
Taken from the top of the slashdot review..
author James Loo with Simon Cozens and Peter Wainwright
pages 429
publisher Apress
rating 7
reviewer James Edward Gray II
ISBN 159059391X
summary A Solid First Perl Tutorial.
The reviewer is a frequent poster to Ruby-talk, an email list devoted to Ruby.
erm, I think you meant @{ $b[0] }. note difference in parenthesis.
The reason the [ ] are needed in the original declaration is because they create an array reference. (Much like @{} dereferences). The ARRAY(0xb75eb0) is simply the reference itself.
Additionally, you can access the inner arrays via $b->[0][$var] for direct access. No one I've explained perl too has particular difficulty with these topics.
As the documentation indicates.
Because of context, as the documentation indicates.
You didn't read the documentation. If you had, you'd know that the parentheses don't do anything besides expression grouping. You'd know that arrays can only contain scalars. You'd know how to store a list in a scalar by using an anonymous array or array reference.
You can agree or disagree with that decision, but until you understand context in Perl and its implications, Perl will continue to confuse you.
how to invest, a novice's guide
which is a bad thing, because it means that even their typos don't show up until it actually tries to run that part of the program. So they think they've succeeded, when really they still have a buggy mess.
Well that's not necessrily a compiled vs. interpreted issue. Give 'em an interactive REPL like with Haskell, OCaml, Lisp, Scheme, etc., and that will catch any of the errors that the compiler would catch -- without having to stop and recompile all of the time. Plus, you get type inferencing goodness with the languages like ML and Haskell which make bugs easier to spot, and essentially do away with the need for explicit type annotations.
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