in reply to Any other good perl books

What Discipulus and davido said. I found the Perl Cookbook extremely eye-opening because it’s not theoretical, it’s task oriented. That said, it’s verrrrrrrry out of date so should be taken as a leg up on modern approaches enabled by the CPAN and newer Perls.

The best penny-dropper for me is reading tests. Most distributions have a test directory called t. On metacpan.org you can search and visit a module/package of interest, click on Browse, navigate to the top of the the package ({USER/PACKAGE-VERSION} formatted name currently), click on t, and read tests. Download and decompress to play around, edit, and run yourself with prove.

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Re^2: Any other good perl books
by davido (Cardinal) on Sep 11, 2019 at 17:08 UTC

    I knew I was leaving something important out: the Perl Cookbook, it's old, but also opens ones eyes to the Perl way (although it really is getting a little long in the tooth).


    Dave

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Re^2: Any other good perl books
by BillKSmith (Monsignor) on Sep 11, 2019 at 20:02 UTC
    Do not worry about Perl Cookbook being 'out-of-date'. It is often possible (but never necessary) to spice up a recipe with a dash of modern perl.
    Bill
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      I agree in spirit, mostly. In that same spirit, it’s also possible to write complex web applications with cgi-lib.pl. :P The Perl Cookbook is 21 years old and best practices have changed radically; Perl 5.4(!) was still new at the time. There is a lot of code in the book that I would be angry to find in production today.

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        "There is a lot of code in the book that I would be angry to find in production today"

        I feel that this statement sums up how many people feel, although I've got nothing to back that up.

        That said, I even suggested a relatively old book where things wouldn't be 'proper' now. What's fantastic, is that there aren't many other above-compiled languages that can state that a 21-year-old book will give you the same results then, as they would now.

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