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>
> My first PERL book was Teach Yourself Perl 5 in 21 days by Sams Publishing
> Second edition. There may be a newer one out now. As a beginner these types
> of books help and explain things in an easy to understand way. In the end
> you will want to buy the camel book. {Programming Perl by O'Reilly}
Sorry, but I have to step in here.
A lot of these types of books (at least the perl ones) have a very nasty
property of being misleading, wrong and buggy. I've seen people who have
been working in perl for a number of years pick up any one of these
(24 Hours | 21 Days | Dummies | Idiots | Special Edition | Complete Reference )
type of books and open any random page and find 2-3 *SERIOUS* flaws within
10 seconds. And continue to a series of 5 more random pages with the
same results.
No, these people aren't complaining about typography, prose style or
other mundane issues, but outright bugs and flat out incorrect statements.
I don't think this is a universal condemnation of this style of publishing.
Maddog wrote both editions of "Linux for Dummies", so some of these books
may have some redeeming qualities in other subject areas. I won't hazard
to guess where, though.
> I have found that what I wanted to do was web cgi perl programming.
>
> Both of which were hard to figure out for a beginner, at the time, from
> either book.
That's a good reason not to recommend either book. Learning Perl and
Elements of Perl Programming have been recommended already. I'd second
the recommendations and recommend the camel book once you can tell the
difference between $a[4] and @a[4].
> The below lines are from a script in matts script archives:
The zeroth law about learning Perl is "AVOID MATT'S SCRIPTS!!!!". Once
you've been using perl for a while, you'll understand why they're so bad.
Z.
PS: http://phl.pm.org/
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