You have already found two of the three best Perl books around.
Effective Perl Programming (Addison-Wesley) is
absolutely fantastic. It focuses on idiomatic Perl, which
provides immediate depth and insight into the workings of
this wonderful language. I often find myself flipping
through the one-liners toward the back of the book, just to
marvel at their beauty and elegance. :-)
Advanced Perl Programming (O'Reilly) gives you a
good overview of the more powerful aspects of Perl. Data
structures, Modules, Networking, OO, GUI development with
Tk...it's all in there.
The third book I always recommend is
Object Oriented Perl. (Manning) It covers OO Perl
in more detail than you may ever truly need. You will
emerge from this book with a hugely expanded understanding
of how Perl works on the inside.
As other posters have pointed out, you simply cannot become
merlyn overnight, but with a good set of tools, and a cool
place to hang out like Perl Monks, we'll all make it (someday).
Russ | [reply] |
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I don't think you can become "the next Randal Schwartz" overnight.
Achieving such a level of expertise takes time and, above all,
practice, practice, practice. I have been programming perl for
over 5 years now, and very intensively for the last two, and I
still get surprised by the things I learn every day (particularly
in this forum).
I have almost every O'Reilly book on perl and a couple of others,
and they have all been very useful at some point. I consult
my camel book and my cookbook every day. If you think the cookbook
is a bunch of man pages strewn together, you have obviously
never used it. It is one of the richest sources of "how to do it"
that I have seen for Perl. The camel book in many places resembles
manual pages, but it also contains a lot of other information.
So here's what I would suggest:
- Get a few good perl books and use them.
- Hang around perlmonks, ask questions and post replies.
- Practice, practice, practice.
--ZZamboni
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I think that when a book or a webpage just says "this is how you do
foo" and always follows that format, you don't learn as much as you are
when you look at an example and go "How does that work?" or sometimes
"Why doesn't that work like I expected?"
I have found, and I am guilty of this too, that when the code is laid out word for word, it
encourages cut-and-paste coding, and you don't learn from it.
An example of this would be the number of bad javascripts that are out
there because someone went to the 20 or so webpages that just let you
copy code and pasted it without really knowing how it all tied together
or what was needed to make it work like they want it to.
That all
said, the Code Catacombs and CUFP are both great nodes to look at for their examples
and what people have done with Perl. | [reply] |
I have many of the O'Reilly books + "Effective Perl Programming" and
they're all great. But once you I got beyond a certain
level I found a few techniques for improving my perl skills that seem
to work well:
- Reading Perlmonks... I sometimes use
Seekers of Perl Wisdom
to test and broaden my skills.
When someone asks a question that I don't know the
answer to I will sometimes
dig-in and see if I can figure it out before reading other's
answers.
- Browse through CPAN to just learn what's new out there.
Discover new modules and figure out how to use them.
- Read the
perl5porters digest and see the future and internals of Perl.
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