I can't recommend books without knowing more about your background as a developer. What other computing languages do you know? If you know Lisp or Scala, I will recommend very different books than if you know C or Java.

As to why I prefer Perl for creating web apps, that I can answer: Perl is a very unopinionated, multi-paradigm programming language. You can move seamlessly between paradigms and while that can be dangerous, it can also be extremely powerful. It is also an extremely flexible programming language.

I remember when I was starting with Perl and thought it felt like a slightly obtuse cousin to PHP. I also remember all the times feeling like "a language shouldn't shove its internals in your face." However over time I have come to really appreciate the power that what I previously considered to be misfeatures give you. For this reason I think the idea that Perl is like an onion is quite apt. It really is a deeply layered language and one you can take extremely far. It's that depth and power which make it my favorite language today.

So rather than recommend books, I am going to recommend a few things in addition:

  1. Learn Lisp if you haven't already. You will be a far more effective Perl programmer and better understand the language if you have at least a basic grasp of Lisp.
  2. Spend some time with Moo and Moose. These are object systems which really get a whole lot right (unlike most object oriented languages out there).

In reply to Re: using perl as a new user by einhverfr
in thread using perl as a new user by scheaz99

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