Learning Perl on Win32 Systems

Item Description: The Llama Book for Windows

Review Synopsis: A decent port of the Llama Book.

This book provides a fairly brief (268 pages including appendices) guided tour of most of perl's basic features, including hashes, arrays, regular expressions, file manipulation, file handles, process management and even a chapter on CGI programming.

Many, many people (I'm in that group too!) have gotten started with perl using this book, so it absolutely works as a tutorial. The exercises (with detailed solutions) are good and really help you to solidify your knowledge at the end of each chapter.

The book suffers a little because it was originally written for UNIX. There are several UNIX-type solutions and paradigms used. This isn't necessarily bad, rather it may not be the optimal approach when teaching people who work with Win32.

The book could have been improved by more information on the Win32 modules, Windows administration and networking and possibly by the deletion of the DBM chapter.

To summarize briefly: if you are using NT and starting to learn perl, this is the book you need. However, there are some rough edges when it comes to the coverage of Win32-specific parts of perl.

Comment on Learning Perl on Win32 Systems

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Learning Perl on Win32 Systems by ajt (Prior) on Sep 28, 2001 at 14:24 UTC
I got this book some time ago, and had very high expectations of it - I had some non-Perl ORA books by then. I was however dissapointed with the book. It's not a bad book, it's just not a great book. I also agree with dze27 it's clear that the book was ported to NT from Unix, and in some places it shows. As mentioned this may or may not be a problem depending on how you think. My main critisim is I think, poor editing, the book repeates it's self in several places, and this makes the book tiring to read at times. Code examples are also not laid out in the best possible format. The book is also getting a little dated now, and ActiveState (love'm or hate'm) have made major improvments to ActivePerl since this book was written. I'd have to say until a new edition is produced, I'd look else where now for an introductory Perl text, say Elements of Programming with Perl or the new edition of Learning Perl.	[reply]
Re: Learning Perl on Win32 Systems by RayRay459 (Pilgrim) on Jul 10, 2001 at 02:12 UTC
This book really is a good place to start. I actually started with the Learning Perl "Llama" book and i am an NT Sys Admin with little Unix knowledge and it was a little hard to get a handle on a couple of concepts, so i switched about half way through and finished with the Learning Perl for Win32 and it helped out alot. I too thought that the DBM chapter could have been left out of this book. I have since moved onto Perl Programming and Win32 Perl books. I like the pace of the Learning Perl books. This was my first programming language and i am hooked. Thanks O'Reilly ~Ray~	[reply]
Re: Re: Learning Perl on Win32 Systems by IDStewart (Acolyte) on Sep 29, 2001 at 00:09 UTC
Hey Ray, Dave Roth has a couple of books out you may want to take a look at: Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions and Win32 Perl Scripting: The Administrator's Handbook. HTH, Ian	[reply]
Re: Learning Perl on Win32 Systems by bladx (Chaplain) on Mar 01, 2001 at 10:37 UTC
Hey, dze27 great review on this great book! I've heard of this book by other people, and it sounds like a great book to check out sometime! After reading your concise review on this book, it helped me solidify my decision to likely check out this book in the near future, or as soon as I can for school projects, and so on, seeing that we are forced to use Win32 systems frequently. About the review, great job on this review again, you clearly put out some pros and cons of what was great about the book, and what could have been added/fixed/changed/etc. in the book as well, which clearly displays this information to anyone like me just reading the review to gather information on a good programming in Perl book to check out!! Keep up the great work in your reviews and what ever other projects you are currenlty involved in! Later... bladx ~ 《uchas veces tengo preguntas!	[reply]


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