I finally finished reading my second book on Perl. Unlike Apress’ Beginning Perl, Learning Perl 5th Edition by Randal Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy is not a book for someone new to programming.
With a solid understanding of dynamic languages like PHP and Ruby, I found most of the material covered on this book very comprehensive, thus said, at times I found myself re-reading portions of the chapters just to understand concept the authors were trying to cover.
For the most part, I read this book jointly with Apress’ Beginning Perl and I found this book to have more practical real word code examples (at least if you’re a sysadmin). The most notably difference on how this book was written for someone who is new to programming with Perl, but to not new to programming are the three chapters the authors dedicate to regular expressions.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Scalar Data
Chapter 3: Lists and Arrays
Chapter 4: Subroutines
Chapter 5: Input and Output
Chapter 6: Hashes
Chapter 7: In the World of Regular Expressions
Chapter 8: Matching with Regular Expressions
Chapter 9: Processing Text with Regular Expressions
Chapter 10: More Control Structures
Chapter 11: Perl Modules
Chapter 12: File Tests
Chapter 13: Directory Operations
Chapter 14: Strings and Sorting
Chapter 15: Smart Matching and given-when
Chapter 16: Process Management
Chapter 17: Some Advanced Perl Techniques
Chapter 14 Introduction to CGI
Chapter 15: Perl and DBI
I would only suggest this book to someone with a solid knowledge of another scripting language.
Learning Perl, 5th Edition
3/5
Yes, we definitely did not target this book at anyone new to programming. I can’t write that kind of book, because I learned to program so early in life that I can’t remember how I learned to do it. :)
But if you know why you would want an array, and what a subroutine is for, you’ll probably do ok.