Considering the experience level of your friend I would suggest Mastering Algorithms With Perl and maybe one other book Learning Perl or Advanced Perl in addition to a short lesson on the use of perldoc. I suggest this because given his exposure to standard algorithms through his CS experience seeing the perl equivelents would probably be the most comfortable way to learn perl idiom without being on completely boring subjects (ie "this is an if statement...".)

Personally I have always found one of the easiest ways to get exposed to a new language is to write something like a bubble sort, or binary tree implementation in the new language. Since I am familiar with how these algorithms work I need not worry that my issues are due to conceptual problems but rather to simple lack of exposure to the correct syntax.

Oh and this might sound heretical to some of the *nix people out there but you could do worse than simply downloading the full set of perldocs in html form from ActiveStates ppm server and giving him a bit of a walkthrough of what is in which. Frankly id be suprised if after spending a day or two working through PerlToot PerlTootC and PerlBoot (with a touch of PerlSyn PerlDat PerlOpentut Perlre thrown in) with a print out of PerlVar and PerlOp and PerlFunc next to him that he didnt have enough for him to make his own decision as to what books to actually _buy_.

Seriously, I cant recommend PerlToot PerlBoot and PerlTootC enough. Since I had already had a good exposure to OO ideas these three documents were enough to make me feel comfortable enough in perl that I didnt end up buying books on the subject till long after (although the one I most appreciate on a regular basis is Mastering Algorithms...) I mean they cover everything from Packages, Subrotuines, Inheiretance, Polymorphism, Closures, AUTOLOAD, basic datatypes, regular expressions.....

UpdateThe name of the activestate HTML bundle of the standard perldocs is: ActivePerl-HTML

Yves / DeMerphq
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Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.

In reply to Re: How To Learn Perl From Scratch by demerphq
in thread How To Learn Perl From Scratch by ajt

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