I've got Perl in a Nutshell. It suffers from the same problem as the others, though perhaps not quite as badly.

The problem is that many authors work hard to show off the great points of the language, but they sometimes present too many new features at once. For example, I wanted a simple explanation of the 'split' function. One explanation I found showed a clever way of combining split and join to perform some interesting task. Unfortunately, it wasn't clear how to use split or join, nor even what was happening. A better way, I feel, would have been to say: "This is what split does...", and then "This is what join does...", and then combine them together into something interesting and fancy.

No book or author is going to please everyone. As you said, whatever you do, someone will complain about it. Still, I think it helps to hear what people have to say.

In reply to Re^3: What's missing in Perl books? by spiritway
in thread What's missing in Perl books? by brian_d_foy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.