Learning Perl 4th Edition Authors: Randal L. Schwartz, Tome Phoenix & brian d foy ISBN: 0-596-10105-8 http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/
Review by Jonathan C. Otsuka Kansas City Perl Mongers http://kc.pm.org 2007-10-04 I have put off this review of Learning Perl 4th Edition for well over a year now. One reason I let this go so long is I didn't think at the time after reading it that I was good enough to write a review about something so new to learn. I know now that this book was only the beginning into learning a new language, and that only reading one book can't make you an expert (and I don't claim to be one yet). After reading Learning Perl. Here are a list of things taught in the book that make me use Perl more and more. Scalar data is a really neat and easy way of storing data used in Perl programs. You don't have to know exactly what type it is going to be an int, char, float, string you just create a variable and store the data unlike you have to do in C/C++. Having an easy way of iterating through arrays or hashes is very simple using a for loop. Hashes are a really neat data structure like arrays which instead of using numbers as indexes you use whatever you like as a index which is then use to retrieve a stored value. Perl is very strong at searching scalar data. Searching strings and matching a particular string is made easy with regular expressions. Another thing which isn't talked about much is CPAN and using modules others have created to make your job as the programmer even easier. I will have to say this book was a very good introduction into Perl (I still use it from time to time as a reference). It has really helped me in getting the basic syntax of Perl down. I would totally recommend this book to anyone that is wanting to begin the journey into programming with Perl. Jonathan _______________________________________________ kc mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/kc
