Re^3: What's missing in Perl books?

I think at least part of the problem was that I was very new to Perl and probably didn't have enough nomenclature sorted out. Specific details are hard to remember - this was six months ago after all.

I recall looking for help with populating HoH and AoH type structures and getting very frustrated that there seemed to be examples that were one letter away (AoA ...) from what I wanted to do, but nothing that addressed what I was looking for. Often there didn't seem to be anything that pointed me in the right direction or I couldn't find it. It took a while for dereferencing syntax to sink in and looking that stuff up seemed to be somewhat of a chore.

These days I tend more to use the "Perl Pocket Reference" and perldoc, or the Chatterbox.

I did enjoy reading the Camel and learned a lot from it that way, but not as a reference.

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

Comment on Re^3: What's missing in Perl books?

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Re^4: What's missing in Perl books? by QM (Parson) on Nov 17, 2005 at 04:01 UTC
I think 50% of the quality of a tech book is in the index and the table of contents (in that order). If I can't find it in the index, it may as well not exist in the book -- I'm certainly not going to spend an hour proving the index is correct. I've ranted elsewhere about specific things not being in the Camel index, which turns out were mentioned in the text. I'm not picking on that one, many are like that. In fact, like anything else, there are very few "great" indices. After I had the basic syntax worked out, things like Effective Perl Programming took me further than any reference book. Though I've settled on the Camel book to look up functions. But I would have really liked a printed, indexed version of `perldoc` in the early days. Now, online access is much more prevalent, so it's not a hardship to go looking. But when I'm stuck in a DOS screen trying to read `perldoc perlop`...well, don't go there, I'm still annoyed with it. -QM -- Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re^4: What's missing in Perl books?
by QM (Parson) on Nov 17, 2005 at 04:01 UTC

I've ranted elsewhere about specific things not being in the Camel index, which turns out were mentioned in the text. I'm not picking on that one, many are like that. In fact, like anything else, there are very few "great" indices.

After I had the basic syntax worked out, things like Effective Perl Programming took me further than any reference book. Though I've settled on the Camel book to look up functions. But I would have really liked a printed, indexed version of perldoc in the early days. Now, online access is much more prevalent, so it's not a hardship to go looking. But when I'm stuck in a DOS screen trying to read perldoc perlop...well, don't go there, I'm still annoyed with it.

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

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