Comments on: Perl Books

By: WK

WK — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 12:30:27 +0000

I love the Modern Perl as whole - the book, the blog, the module and it's development model. It is all together facsinating and book lives at Github and evolves with time like a FOSS project should. Very nice! Maybe not best for absolute beginners, but having already some basic knowledge about programming, it gives pretty good introduction into modern Perl world.

By: paul

paul — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:34:49 +0000

Mastering Regular Expressions and Higher Order Perl are two that have been around for a while but are still magnificent. Neither are beginner's books though.

By: nxadm

nxadm — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:42:34 +0000

Besides the books already mentioned, I liked brian d foy’s “Effective Perl Programming” (http://www.effectiveperlprogramming.com/). It’s a good series, the Java one was also very useful.

By: Dave Stoddard

Dave Stoddard — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:21:15 +0000

Steven, thanks for the tip. For some reason I was not aware of Perlbrew. I am going to install it on one of my systems this afternoon and play with it. It appears to be a great workaround for a problem that has been driving me nuts for a long time. Thanks.

By: Tom Purl

Tom Purl — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 15:06:57 +0000

Do you have a list of books that you would recommend? I have trouble thinking of more than 2 or 3 modern Perl books that are worth reading, so I would like to see the dozen that you quote.

By: Steven R

Steven R — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 07:16:07 +0000

Dave, you should take a look at perlbrew if you don’t know about it already. It will let you compile newer and older versions of Perl on a system and keep them isolated from one another. The legacy apps can use the old system Perl while your newer application can use a newer version of Perl.

By: Lee C

Lee C — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 18:42:38 +0000

I think pointing people at Chromatic’s modern Perl book would be good. I think older books are valuable to more experience programmers.

What do people think about having TPF provide grants to fund creating free books for new or beginning users?

It could be a separate funding drive, this might be one way to bring new blood into Perl and provide guidance in modern techniques to beginning (or returning) coders.

By: Dave Stoddard

Dave Stoddard — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:14:26 +0000

I agree with your argument that teaching from out of date sources is not ideal. However, I have had to teach a number of newbies Perl, and for many, this is the first programming language they have ever dealt with. In that case, I am more interested in the teaching methodology for building a foundation of skills. I use a combination of books, including Lerner’s “CORE Perl” (very out of date) and Schwartz “Learning Perl” with its student workbook (covers up to Perl 5.10). Once they get over struggling with the mechanics of the language and the concept of programming, it is easy to introduce them to the more modern aspects of Perl, like the say and given verbs, lexical filehandles, and unicode.

One last point (and HTML and CSS share this same issue with Perl), just because something is the latest and greatest does not mean you should use it. If you write software for a living, and have to install that software in a variety of environments, it is very likely that some of your target environments will not be running the latest version of Perl. Some of my not-for-profit association clients run Perl 5.6 and 5.8 in order to run legacy applications they don’t understand, written by people long gone from their organization. If the client is unwilling to upgrade, you need to write your application so it will run in any environment.

Sure, I wish I had the power to force all of my clients to move to Perl 5.16, but I don’t. And my competitors are more than willing to accept client systems as is, so if I want to do business, my applications need to deal with out of date releases of Perl. So instead of “say”, I use “print” and stick a newline on the end. I do keep a list of which versions of Perl my clients use, and I gently push my clients to upgrade. But it is a slow, tedious process. We are experimenting now with shipping our applications on a disk that gets mounted into a standalone system — this gets around the out of date Perl problem. So far, we have had very little push back from the clients we have offered this to.

By: Abigail

Abigail — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:01:02 +0000

Lexical filehandles (well, lexical *references* to file handles) have been possible since 5.000, which predates most Perl books.

Hardly anyone used them.

It wasn’t until filehandles autovivified (in 5.6.0) that lexical filehandles became popular. Before that, people prefered to use bare word file handles over typing a short extra line.

By: Imran Javaid

Imran Javaid — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:27:52 +0000

oh, shoot. I must have missed the memo on the new edition of Intermediate Perl. Going to run out and get it asap!