For me, it has been :
The Perl Black Book is a trilogy o' trilogies, for therein you got inductions into Tk, Web programming and CGI each on their own right among other assortments. The daunting thing is, it maybe of a considerable volume, and the positive thing which has been for me is that, it cuts the beating-around-the-bush and it doesn't have exercises, I think this is great because examples sort of tame your horizon from expanding on heuristics, after all, what
The Monastery is all about if it gives not the day to day cases met by a lot of monks for other monks to dig in as sources of various examples and cases... I also like the book for it has characters in it:
- The Programming Style Correctness Czar.
- The ironic strong-personality Big Boss, Mr BB, with his monocle and cigar and strong C programming know-hows.
- The Novice Programmer, Mr NP, who repeatedly gets himself in coding troubles and who hilariously fears Mr BB.
- You, who started novice and progressively began to save the poor NP from the organization predators and dodge Mr BB merciless attacks on Perl by showing him what Perl can do when compared to C and where it does stand unique among the rest of the lot, TIMTOWTDI nature and the inherent memory allocation are some of the reply-backs.
It is a great reference and problem solver and that can be extended to become a fun text-book indeed of > 1200 pages....
Excellence is an Endeavor of Persistence.
Chance Favors a Prepared Mind.