Danny Lu wrote:
Hi, can anyone tell me where I can get a good perl book?
TIA
Dan
Dan et. al.
After purchasing 5 books on PERL and two on Regular Expression, here is
what I found.
Since I was (and am) a beginning programmer (at 52), I was looking for a
book that would offer examples and was well organized.
The one that I bought which seems to be the best for a newbie programmer
is "Teach Yourself PERL in 24 Hours".
Obviously the 24 Hour part is a marketing thing but my guess is that if
you already code in another language and know Regular Expression, This
might actually be possible.
It has good examples and takes things in proper order. Fro me as a
neophyte, there are questions that occur to me that the book does not
answer when *I* need them but, those cases are so far pretty rare.
My books all come from
http://www.bookpool.com and the price was VERY
reasonable.
Now, if you are a little bit conversant with coding concepts, you might
be able to use the free resource of perldoc. I downloaded the entire
perldoc package to my Linux boxes and use it regularly. Surprisingly.
the PERL regular expression tutorial (perlretut.pdf/html) is actually
better to read than ANY of the books I have bought.
Many coders at my company swear that Regular expressions is the toughest
part of programming in any language. Last year I took a pass at Java
with a great book from WROX press called "Beginning Java". Doing this
lead me to the conclusion that for OO languages, the hard part is
knowing what is already available in the class libraries that you don't
need to write yourself.
There is a "Beginning Regular Expressions" book that I bought and sent
back as it did not help me with PERL. My judgment on
You might try the perldoc tutorials first and see how you do. For me,
the old fart, I think I need a bit more hand-holding.
My plan is to get mediocre at PERL and then try Ruby to accomplish the
task I need.
Also, be advised that when you download perl to your computer, the
chances are good that all the modules are not loaded by default. So, if
you decide to "use Net::HTTP: and find it absent, you have to load it.
I have not seen that process covered in *any* book yet.
Good Luck to you no matter which book you choose.
Regards,
Ralph H. Stoos Jr.
