I noticed that the london pm website was down so got the from Dean. Please
see review below.
H
Elements of Programming With Perl</booktitle>
Andrew L Johnson
If you come from a non-programming background and you want to learn Perl go
and buy this book. Now. The rest of the review will wait until you get back.
If your coming to Perl from another language and you have basic to
intermediate knowledge and experience of programming concepts go and buy
this book. If you know Perl well then buy this book and when ever anyone
asks you a lot of questions hand it to them and smile as you realise you've
just done them a favour.
>From the start to the end of this book it smells of good practice. All the
code is readable, all the examples use strict and warnings to catch the
usual typos and human errors and the concepts of clear and idiomatic coding
are explained and illustrated in a style that makes the book an easy read.
The first part of the book, chapters 1 through 3, provide the gentle but
essential grounding that shows you not just how to get into the correct
frame of mind for programming but how to program Perl in the style of other
conscientious Perl programmers. With examples that can actually be
considered useful enough to warrant saving (A rare thing in itself!) and an
explanation of some of the best coding practices to use for Perl coding this
section serves as a good base for any non-programmers that want to pick up
Perl as a new language.
The second part of the book introduces the basic concepts that you need to
be able to start solving day to day problems with Perl. By moving the reader
onto useful explanations and examples so early in the book it encourages the
reader to play around with the language and makes it simpler to do things
with the language without becoming confused with meaningless minutiae. By
the end of the six chapters that comprise the second part of the book the
reader will have enough of a grounding in Perl to be able to write small
programs and follow the basics of any reasonably well written piece of Perl
code.
Following this section come a group of chapters that cover some of the more
intermediate features of Perl such as an introduction to the regular
expression features of Perl. A subject that can be counted on in most other
cases to give the impression of an impenetrable hedge of line noise but in
this case is explained simply from the bottom up with progressively less
trivial examples. One of the best features in this section of the book are
the diagrams that show how a Perl regular expression works its way along a
string trying to match. I defy you to be confused about how a regex works
after reading this chapter.
The other chapters in this section cover more advanced aspects of topics
introduced in the last section with more coverage of the less used IO
capabilities and how the regex engine integrates with Perl strings. The last
chapter of this section that deserves a special mention is the chapter on
using modules, a section of the book that shows one of the reasons why the
Perl community is so useful and how to harness the communities work with
code reuse with modules from CPAN.
The closing section of the book is an introduction to some of the more
advanced Perl features. Covering topics such as Perls object-orientated
capabilities and how to build your own modules to allow you greater
flexibility in your projects as well as giving a taste of the work others
have put in to make their modules available. This section only gives basic
coverage, the aim of the book is to teach basic to intermediate Perl, but it
does serve as a nice teaser to what else is available and acts as a brief
'where do I go next?' ending to the book.
I don't really have anything bad to say about this slim tome, I've seen
multiple people learn basic Perl from it and I found it to be a good read
despite having moderate Perl experience when I first read it. What I will
say is that I wish this book had been present when I had started to learn
Perl because as a starting Perl book this one's going to take some beating.
Summary:
Whether you're new to programming and want to learn via Perl or you're new
to Perl but know another language this book will be hard to beat. A good
balance of theory and hands on with a sprinkle of some of the clearest
descriptions to be found in the world of Perl documentation makes this the
book I recommend as a standalone volume for learning Perl.>
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