I second the Camel book as a break-though experience in learning perl. I'd wrestled with perl for two years before I read the book

I credit the fact that the Camel book was at the center of my first attempts to learn Perl with the real love that I developed for the language.

I tend to charactarize languages based on the experience I had learning them. The languages for which I've initially picked up documentation that was excellent (especially Inform and Perl, also BASIC (the ITT Advanced BASIC manual), and to some extent Emacs Lisp) are languages that I love; the languages that I've tried to learn with poor documentation (C, C++, VB, PHP) I have hated and continue to avoid. There are also languages that I dislike on their own merits (CoBOL, Lingo), but the languages I *really* loathe are the ones I tried to learn from poor documentation. The one I hate most (C++) I tried three times to learn, with three different pieces of documentation, all three of which were bad.

So anyway, when I wanted to learn Perl, I asked around on the internet, "Hey, I'm a CS grad and program in several languages, but I want to learn Perl, what book should I get?", and several people said to get the Camel book, and I did, and lo, it was good.

"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."  — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68

In reply to Re: Roads to Perl by jonadab
in thread Roads to Perl by gunzip

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