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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.
was there really a market for another beginner's book in Perl?
Learning Perl (O'Reilly) did an absolutely exquisite job at introducing people to programming and Perl simultaneously.
"All that glitters is not gold"
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!
It assumes no prior knowledge of Perl or of programming in general.
Does it mention the need for chicken blood, human tallow candles and pentagrams made from ground baby skull? Sorry, I liked Perl Back In The Day but the OO is just bolted on and I can't do anything with it I can't accomplish with Python (or Ruby although I'm still learning that).
Trolling is a art,
I'd hardly call HTML a programming language...
I'd recommend C, which any decent *nix install should include, then move to perl.
but then I love C...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
don't forget to pick up a copy of the new perl 6 book!
- tristan
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
HTML? Isn't that a markup language, and not a programming language? How does HTML teach you any programming concepts?
... PHP. *shudder*. "Like Perl without the toolbox, like C without the speed".
And then
You give no reason why you wouldn't recommend Perl as a starting language, so I can't rebutt them. However, I would, for one reason:
It allows programming to be FUN. Ideally, everyone would learn ASM first, then C, then Lisp, then Python, then Perl, then Ruby. But you'll probably have killed most people's desire to program with the first two, and freaked them out with the third.
+Pete
Score:-1, Funny
Perl is a great beginner's language. You don't have to compile it, the required variable prefixes clearly allow newbies to see what's a scalar, array, etc at least until you get into the more complicated dereferencing, and the user can be introduced to the more natural-language forms first, so they don't get parenthesization shock (e.g. $i = 2 unless $this or $that;)
Someone had to do it.
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
HTML? Isn't that a markup language, and not a programming language? How does HTML teach you any programming concepts?
... which was a revelation for me, and for many others. In my case, at least, cobbling together my first pointless, amateurish "this is my homepage hope you like it" Web page led, slowly but quite directly, to a programming career. And I don't think I'm unique in this.
Actually, HTML is a very good thing for people who have never done any programming in their lives to learn, because it does teach what I consider not only a "programming language concept," but the very idea of programming: giving the computer a series of instructions which produce an output noticeably different from the input. This is fundamentally different from the way most people use computers, in which output immediately follows input, and one is obviously a product of the other.
No, HTML isn't Turing-complete, and no, learning it won't teach you any of the theoretical basis of programming. But it will teach you how to write something that can meaningfully be called "code," and let you see the results of your work
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It assumes no prior knowledge of Perl or of programming in general.
Books that assume no prior knowledge of programming should also give the student an idea of what else they need to know beside programming before they can do any real work.
A partial list would be:
I also recommend:
Also, alert the student that it takes 5 years to become proficient and every 5 years half of what he knows is obsolete.
(if (parses (your brain) (things that way)) (is (lisp fun)))
To be honest mine doesn't (which is probably why the above is quite wrong), but I do know people who seem to find it far more "natural" and "readable".
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts