in reply to Perl intro book for .Net programmer

As the previous posters have said, probably the two best books to get started with are the Llama, and the Camel (in that order).

Once you get going a bit, there are two others that I would thoroughly recommend:

  1. Perl Best Practices, by Damian Conway. This one will teach you all the good habits to get into whilst writing Perl code, so that your code becomes readable, robust and maintainable.
  2. The Perl Cookbook, by Christiansen & Torkington. Literally hundreds of "pre-cooked" recipes for solving some of the most common problems with Perl.

Oh, and you might be interested in the results of this fairly recent poll :)

Cheers,
Darren :)

  • Comment on Re: Perl intro book for .Net programmer

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Re^2: Perl intro book for .Net programmer
by doom (Deacon) on Aug 19, 2006 at 18:56 UTC
    I just wanted to emphasize that recommendation for "The Perl Cookbook": you'll certainly want some sort of tutorial ("Learning Perl" or one of it's competitors), but the "Cookbook" needs to be high on the list right after that, possibly even before the Camel itself. You're in a position where you need to get productive quickly, and the "Cookbook" is ideal for that -- it is not, by the way, just a canned list of recipies, each recipie comes with a short article explaining what's going on: perfect for learning as you go.

    "Best Practices" is a good book also, though myself I find that I have at least minor disagreements with quite a few of it's recommendations (perhaps as much as 20%).

    Also, the perl online documentation is generally pretty good and includes a number of "tutorial" articles on different subjects. On a unix box try a "man perl", that brings up a directory of the different man pages, with a section on "tutorials" right near the top.