Er... actually... that's "Perl" not "PERL".

I looked at all of the books on PERL in a few bookstores, and the one that made the most sense to me was SAMS "Teach Yourself PERL in 21 days."

This book was really good when it covered perl4, but the perl 5 version is a complete rewrite (by Laura Lemay if I remember correctly) and is no good.

I recommended it to an ambitious and effective webmaster, believing the book was just an update of the old one. She found it next to useless for a beginner, you simply choke on the first examples unless you are accustomed to reading STDIN.

/jeorgen

I actually used the version 5 book starting at ground zero. I found it really useful. That's just me.

Thing to remember is that there are two criteria for how good a book is - how well you learn from it and how useful the stuff is that it teaches you. Someone might learn really well from a 'Dummies' style book, but because 'Perl for Dummies' teaches some really bad habits, it's still a bad idea to try and learn from it.

Simon Cozens wrote a good article about Choosing a Perl book for www.perl.com.

The only Perl books that I've seen that teach beginners Perl both well and factually are "Learning Perl", "Elements of Programming with Perl" and "Perl - The Programmers Companion". I've also heard good reports about "Beginning Perl" and "Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours" - but not having read them yet I can't really comment.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000, ICA, London
<http://www.yapc.org/Europe/>

OzzyOsbourne wrote:

I found it really useful. That's just me.

Do you have a Unix shell background? Maybe that could explain the different opinion.

/jeorgen