Good beginning book for a never-before programmer.

[darQueskye]

I'm brand new to the programming scene and I just got into Perl by a friend's recommendation.

(I just wrote my first "Hello, world." code last night. :-D)

I've always been fascinated by the world of programming but have been somewhat daunted by the cost of books and references (And my math sucks, lol.).

Anybody know of any good ULTRA-beginning Perl books or even (maybe free) online references? Any experience with Perl for Dummies?

Thanks everybody!

p.s.. I use the term "programmer" VERY loosely. ;-)

[numberwhun]

@darQueskye
My best recommendation is the Learning Perl book from Oreilly. Its written as a tutorial and is very well done. I tend to use it as my bible. Do not forget about things like the perldoc website either.

Regards,

Jeff

[darQueskye]

@numberwhun
Thanks for the quick reply and the links. I'll check them out. What I've noticed is a lot of other books aren't quite up to date. I found a lot that went up to 5.8 but not 5.10.

Thanks again. :-)

[darQueskye]

I'm using Windows Vista, by the way.

If that means anything about anything.

[numberwhun]

@darQueskye

That just means that you are going to:

#1. Have to choose if you want to use Active State Perl or Strawberry Perl ( I highly recommend Strawberry Perl). You can only have one installed.

#2. You are going to have to mind any Windows specific coding, especially with regards to win32 based modules.

Regards,

Jeff

[chorny]

"Learning Perl" 5th edition is about perl 5.10. "Beginning Perl" (free) - 5.6.

[darQueskye]

@numberwhun
First of all, thanks a lot, Jeff, for your help. I already have ActivePerl right now.. What are the main differences between the two?

[darQueskye]

I gotta say, though, that when I go to the site and see a quote about it from Larry Wall, it's a pretty good indicator that it'd be the way to go.

[numberwhun]

@darQueskye
I don't like ActivePerl myself. The reason... you are limited to the CPAN modules that they can port to their proprietary packaging system. If they can't or haven't ported it, then you are up the creek. I ran into that a few times and then found Strawberry Perl (Thanks KevinADC).

Strawberry Perl uses the standard, Unix like CPAN command line interface. For me, its the most comfortable and familiar. And, the biggest plus, it uses CPAN directly and is not limited by a proprietary packaging system.

Sure, there are repositories you can add for Active Perl, but again, you are still limited and I suggest that people learn Strawberry Perl, but its my preference.

Regards,

Jeff

[darQueskye]

@numberwhun

So I installed Strawberry Perl last night, and it went a lot smoother than ActivePerl did. Uninstalling ActivePerl was a bit of a catastrophe as well. I feel a lot more comfortable with Strawberry, just based on ease of installation. Thanks for the recommendation. :-)

[numberwhun]

@darQueskye
Anytime! Plus, when you see examples in books of using the cpan command line interface, you can use that from the DOS prompt, just as the book shows. :)