Perl Power!: The Comprehensive Guide

 (3 customer reviews)

This is one of the best Perl books I've ever read as a novice. I'm not quite the newbie but still very, very green and this book has supercharged my Perl programming ability. I tend to approach the same topic from several different authors for a balanced approach so in this case I've read through at least 4 other Perl books.

What's so different about this book? The pragmatic code examples, clear explanations of code line-by-line, and the illustrations/visual examples of key programming topics.

Some of the aims of this book are "...to make programming fun" and to "...provide certain advantages over the other books because it offers programs that tell or follow stories (or use cases). At the same time, efforts have been made to present verbose samples that emphasize language features in isolation. The code contains extensive commentary, and the book covers the code on a line-by-line basis whenever possible and supplements the commentary in the code files."...Read more

When I first learned perl for my bioinformatics project, I tried several different perl books such as for dummies or sams beginner books. None of them were even close to this book. Very well written by a teacher who knows what the students want, progmatic approaches, properly organized introductions to useful tools (such as DzSoft editor) and wonderul examples of real codes. This is a great beginner's guide, and will also be great even for who have just finished for dummies or sams beginner books. I cannot understand even how there are no reviews yet on this wonderful book.

Yet another Perl tutorial? It seems so. I found this on Safari while reviewing the newest books available through the service. I had not encountered the publisher or author previously, and decided to give the book a quick review of key concepts, much akin to Schwern's litmus test for Perl books.

There's no confusion between $#array and scalar @array because, as far as my cursory look showed, neither are mentioned. Also absent are mistakes regarding processing the return values from localtime--also because localtime seems to be absent altogether. That seems to be a recurring theme in this book: rather than make mistakes typically found by Schwern's litmus test, this book eschews coverage of the topics altogether. One plus that this gives the book is that it conveniently neglects to mention that & sub exists (though it covers references but--shockingly--doesn't cover subroutine references) and that's fine by me.

However, this leaves the reader with quite scant...Read more