in reply to Are these Perl Textbooks Good?

Hi Svetlana,

I personally found Learning Perl 6th Edition to be a fantastic book for learning the rudiments of Perl. I have a heavily highlighted and annotated copy that I keep as a reference when I forget how to do things I haven't done in awhile. I highly recommend it.

I actually just received my copy of Intermediate Perl in the mail yesterday, so I can't comment on that yet, but I'm expecting it to be similarly helpful in establishing a good foundation of other basic things about the Perl language.

UPDATE: Also, don't worry too much about the version difference. I started on version 5.22 even though the book was written under the earlier version, and I didn't run in to any problems. You can probably skip Chapter 15 of Learning Perl that covers Smart Match and Given-When, or at least leave them until you complete the rest of the book. Both of those things are experimental in the current version of Perl so they could change or be taken out completely. That said, I do shamelessly use Smart Match on occasion purely for debugging purposes, but not for "production" code of any kind.

I love it when things get difficult; after all, difficult pays the mortgage. - Dr. Keith Whites
I hate it when things get difficult, so I'll just sell my house and rent cheap instead. - perldigious

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Re^2: Are these Perl Textbooks Good?
by stevieb (Canon) on Sep 23, 2016 at 19:56 UTC

    No recommendation for books, but if you're interested in the discussions on smartmatch, here's a thread that cropped up on the p5p mailing list and has been ongoing for a couple weeks relating to the fate of smartmatch in the next release (5.26.0).

[reply]

      Thanks for the link stevieb. It's good to know it's still being actively discussed, though I get the impression from the conversation the verdict is still very much out as to what will ultimately be done (if anything).

      I was also curious enough to try to quick Google and perldoc search what they might have been talking about with the Smart Match overloading $x~~, but after not finding an explanation immediately and upon deeper reflection I decided that no... no this probably is one keyhole I don't want to look through. :-)

      I love it when things get difficult; after all, difficult pays the mortgage. - Dr. Keith Whites
      I hate it when things get difficult, so I'll just sell my house and rent cheap instead. - perldigious
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[d/l]
Re^2: Are these Perl Textbooks Good?
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 23, 2016 at 19:12 UTC
    Hi perldigious , Many thanks for your reply. Much appreciated.
[reply]

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