This book should have been named as “The Definitive Perl Guide”. Because it truly is so. A few highlights of the book are as follows:

In the Introduction section itself, the author makes it absolutely clear that “This book is about money”, meaning it focuses on getting the reader “production ready”. Which is why, it focuses on Perl Version 5.8 and 5.10. as these are the Perl Versions running on most of the production servers. Perl is backwards compatible and the code in the book also runs on all the latest versions of Perl. I’m on Strawberry Perl Version 5.20.2 and whatever code examples I’ve tried work as is.

The way this book explains “Context” of Perl is simply amazing and amazingly simple.

Same goes for the way the author explains how to write chained ternary operators, references, regular expressions and many other concepts. I could never wrap my head around the regular expressions, but this book made it crystal clear. I had to read through the Perl docs to refer to some specific requirements, and I had read the doc earlier, but this time, it all made sense.

I’m not a programmer by profession. I’m a storage administrator on lookout for writing some scripts to automate certain critical monitoring stuff, and this book was immensely helpful in that. By the time I finish reading this book and trying out the code given in there, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to write even better scripts. The book is also sprinkled with the best practices and author has taken care to explain why.

I had read the book on OFPS, the Open Feedback Publishing System of the publication where they basically put the book online for a few weeks, and was looking forward to buy it. I couldn’t buy it immediately as job and other responsibilities took a lot of time, but bought the book now that I can devote some small chunk of time every day to learning Perl.

The author is indeed a Perl Guru and his writing style makes it pretty obvious. It’s not an easy task to cover so much of Perl in one single book.

If you need just one single book that will get you “production ready” with Perl, indeed, this is the one to go for. I hope there was a PDF version of this book, that’s my only gripe.

Thanks Ovid for writing such a fabulous book.

In reply to Beginning Perl by Ovid Curtis Poe by pritesh

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