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
Wrox sent me "Beginning Perl", so I read it. Simon did a good job, however he has said that the editors introduced some errors. He was not happy when the book first came out. But, overall it is a very good book for beginners. TYPi24H, by Clinton Pierce, is also a pretty good book. I did a technical review for it when he was still writing it, and it was very good, although now stigmatized because it has a time duration in it's title :) So, these books could be useful for someone wanting to learn Perl. I always find it best to be in a bookstore, grab a latte, and read some of each book (as well as the index, and TOC) to see which is written in a way you feel most comfortable with.
Cheers,
KM | [reply] |
I always find it best to be in a bookstore, grab a
latte, and read some of each book (as well as the index,
and TOC) to see which is written in a way you feel most
comfortable with.
A very civilised way to buy books - let's see Amazon
come up with something like that on the web (and patent
it!)
My point was that by doing that, you can get a pretty
good grasp of how well you'll be able to interact with a
book's teaching style, but unless you know something about
the subject then it's difficult to know how factually
accurate the book will be. And if you want to learn Perl
then chances are that you know very little about it.
I have no solution to this problem. I just wanted to
point out that when people say "this book was really good"
then they generally mean that they enjoyed the style rather
than that the book taught good Perl.
--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>
European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000, ICA, London
<http://www.yapc.org/Europe/>
| [reply] |
A very civilised way to buy books - let's see Amazon come up with something like that on the web (and patent it!)
I believe if you have any type of coffee while buying on Amazon, you have to pay them for that too ;)
difficult to know how factually accurate the book will be
Good point. I remember when I was learning Perl (in '94) there wasn't the saturation of the market with Perl books like there is now. So, you had to trust what was there. And even today, without a person researching who an author is, or who has given good reviews of a book, it is hard for them to know what to trust. For example, the name Randal Schwartz doesn't carry much value with someone who knows nothing about Perl, unless they research the name...
So, people hopefully do their research to make sure the author of the book knows what they are talking about, or choose what reads best to them.
I have had some conversations in my Perl Monger group about how many people learned something about Perl by using/reading/hacking on Matt Wrights scripts. We all now know that they are bad, but at the time of Perl 4, they seemed like good examples to many people. Many people learned bad things, and some unlearned those bad things.
It's the same with books. If you know nothing, and pick up a bad book, you will likely learn some bad things, and later need to unlearn them. If someone learns with Perl for Dummies (a bad book), they will hopefully learn enough about Perl itself that unlearning bad programming practice will come with reading other books, and seeing code, and participating in the Perl community. It takes a community to raise a good Perl hacker! :)
Cheers,
KM
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