I second the Camel book as a break-though experience in learning perl. I'd wrestled with perl for two years before I read the book and it gave such an insight in the language and its philosophy. I believe that unless you're a very experienced programmer, you just can't learn to be a really good perl programmer if you haven't read it.
| [reply] |
I second the Camel book as a break-though experience in learning perl. I'd wrestled with perl for two years before I read the book
I credit the fact that the Camel book was at the center
of my first attempts to learn Perl with the real love
that I developed for the language.
I tend to
charactarize languages based on the experience I
had learning them. The languages for which I've
initially picked up documentation that was excellent
(especially Inform and Perl, also BASIC (the ITT
Advanced BASIC manual), and to some extent Emacs
Lisp) are languages that I love; the languages that
I've tried to learn with poor documentation (C, C++,
VB, PHP) I have hated and continue to avoid. There
are also languages that I dislike on their own merits
(CoBOL, Lingo), but the languages I *really* loathe
are the ones I tried to learn from poor documentation.
The one I hate most (C++) I tried three times to learn,
with three different pieces of documentation, all
three of which were bad.
So anyway, when I wanted to learn Perl, I asked around
on the internet, "Hey, I'm a CS grad and program in
several languages, but I want to learn Perl, what book
should I get?", and several people said to get the
Camel book, and I did, and lo, it was good.
"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."
— Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68
| [reply] |
