in reply to Perlbooks with animals pictures

For historical reasons, most of the best Perl books are published by O'Reilly. I suspect this is at least partly because the Camel book (Programming Perl) was one of the really early Perl books and, because of who wrote it, also very good. Since that one was published by O'Reilly, which worked out very well for all concerned, some of the other people in the Perl community, when they wrote Perl books, knew about this and chose the same publisher. (O'Reilly is also well regarded in technical circles anyway, but IMO this is especially so in the Perl community.)

There _are_ other Perl books, of course. But the O'Reilly ones tend to be the better ones. For one thing they tend to be written by people whose names are already known in Perl circles, people who know Perl inside and out. (Although, some of those people have also gone on occasion with other publishers, e.g., Effective Perl Programming is published by Addison-Wesley, and MJD published with a company called Morgan Kaufmann, whoever they are, so O'Reilly doesn't have a total monopoly on good Perl books, just the majority of them.)


Sanity? Oh, yeah, I've got all kinds of sanity. In fact, I've developed whole new kinds of sanity. You can just call me "Mister Sanity". Why, I've got so much sanity it's driving me crazy.

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Re^2: Perlbooks with animals pictures
by friedo (Prior) on Nov 17, 2006 at 18:05 UTC
Re^2: Perlbooks with animals pictures
by j3 (Friar) on Nov 17, 2006 at 18:31 UTC
    Speaking of other publishers of books on Perl, I recently stumbled upon Onyx Neon, which looks promising.
Re^2: Perlbooks with animals pictures
by merlyn (Sage) on Nov 18, 2006 at 10:54 UTC
    I suspect this is at least partly because the Camel book (Programming Perl) was one of the really early Perl books and, because of who wrote it, also very good.
    Thank you. It was a great project, and I'm glad to have helped make it a historical event, although at the time, it was just a way to get some more instructions down for Perl users, using my combined skills as an award-winning technical writer and editor as well as being a programmer from nearly birth. {grin}

    But truly, O'Reilly was (is still?) the only publisher run by people who started as technical writers, so they're much more inclined to let the smart authors do their thing and concentrate on all the rest of the stuff an author needs to be successful.

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
    Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.