Beginning Perl, Second Edition

• #16 in Best Perl Books

15 Reviews

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Beginning Perl, 2nd edition, by James Lee, et al., is a splendid
introduction to the Perl programming language, version 5.8.3. The flow
of the book is logical, straightforward, and highly readable. Text is
heavily sprinkled with program examples that the reader can easily try
out along the way, as well as exercises at the end of most chapters,
with solutions in the appendix. Chapters are short, clear, and
engaging.

After a brief discussion of the history of Perl and a listing of
numerous helpful online resources, the book quickly moves on to the
logistics of running a Perl program, followed by descriptions of basic
program elements and control flow. Then it's ahead to more
sophisticated data elements - lists, arrays, and hashes - and finally
functions and subroutines.

After a solid and seemingly effortless explanation of these "basics,"
the book moves to one of the most powerful features in Perl - regular
expressions - and how these can be used to access files and data. From
there, the discussion expands to string processing and references. The
book concludes with discussions of more "advanced" Perl features,
including object-orientation, modules, and use with webservers and
databases.

Regardless of topic, the writing style stays crisp, clear, and
example-filled, making this book a highly effective and enjoyable way to
get a jump-start into Perl programming for the novice or a quick
refresher for the expert wanting a Perl 5 update.

I use this book to teach Perl in a university course. I feel it does a very good job at exposing just enough of Perl to make it useful without confusing beginning students. I chose this over O'Reilly's Learning Perl (also a good book) because this book goes into References, Modules and a bit of OO Perl, and also has what I feel is slightly better treatment of shortcuts like $_ as well as lexically-scoped variables with 'my'. O'Reilly has broken these topics across two books (Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl), both fine books but I only want the students to have to buy one book. I feel that Perl is not very useful without references, so that was the major reason for switching to this book for a beginning Perl course. I highly recommend it.

This is a very capable introduction to Perl that I think is intended for reasonably experienced programmers. It is not intended to teach Perl as a first computer language, and it does not pander to the reader. The Perl it teaches is strong industry standard Perl that is in line with what could reasonably be considered best practice. That's something in a language that prides itself on having many ways to do one thing.

The book covers the entire topic of Perl from the basics of writing a script, through functions, modules, and into object oriented programming. It also covers vital community information such as the use of CPAN.

If you have not read Programming Perl then I believe you should start there. But if you find that book has too much of a learning curve then I would recommend this book or Learning Perl (O'Reilly.)

Another winning title from Apress, Beginning Perl, Second Edition provides a strong base of knowledge for anyone new to Perl or who needs to broaden their knowledge. Each of the fifteen chapters examines one of the common uses of Perl and provides sufficient detail to actually write some pretty sophisticated programs. It is pretty much impossible to do anything of any value in Perl without understanding data types, operators, and variables so these are all covered first. From there the reader enters the world of flow control constructs, lists and arrays, hashes, subroutines, and functions. This section includes information on passing arguments, an area that is left out of a lot of beginning books and is an exercise in frustration trying to find out how to do. The reader next moves on to regular expressions, file and data handling, string processing, interfacing with the operating system, and references. Finally the book winds up with object-oriented Perl, modules, CGI, and using Perl with DBI to interact with a SQL database.

The book is well written with lots of code examples so you can see exactly how something should be written to work correctly. While you might want a Perl cookbook to help resolve particular problems when you come across them, Beginning Perl, Second Edition is a great choice to move from no knowledge or little knowledge of Perl to becoming an intermediate Perl user. It is highly recommended to anyone wanting to acquire a well-rounded foundation in Perl.

I had no idea what Perl was when I bought this book. After a week of reading, I was able to write basic scripts and perform a variety of tasks. I am not a developer, and do not plan to become one. But I am always curious about how to do difference things. This book will not make you a super Perl programmer, but it will teach you all the basics and then some.

Something I've wanted to do for the last couple of years is learn the Perl programming language. With that in mind, I decided to review James Lee's book Beginning Perl, 2nd Edition by Apress. Now I can't wait to get started.

Chapter List: First Steps in Perl; Scalars; Control Flow Constructs; Lists and Arrays; Hashes; Subroutines/Functions; Regular Expressions; Files and Data; String Processing; Interfacing to the Operating System; References; Object-Oriented Perl; Modules; Introduction to CGI; Perl and DBI; Exercise Solutions; Index

In my job, Perl isn't one of those things that I absolutely need. I don't have to administer a website that is driven by Perl scripts or anything. I simply want to learn the basics so that I can use Perl if I need to manipulate files to generate test data or things like that. This book delivers well for that need. Each chapter explains the basic language feature or construct with plenty of examples and explanations. The chapter ends with a summary and additional exercises you can do to practice the skills covered in the chapter. In all likelihood, I'll be most interested in the chapters through the string processing one. That will give me most of the tools I'll need to manipulate the files I'll encounter. But if I get really addicted to Perl, there's additional material here that will keep the book in the "highly useful" category.

As I move into 2005 and start to work on my technical goals, this book will be close at hand.

For server side scripting, Perl is now one of the favourite languages. Lee shows how you can quickly and easily grasp the basic syntax and begin programming usefully in it. He stresses in his presentation that no prior knowledge of Perl is needed. Strictly, not even of another programming language. If this describes you, his book should be quite understandable, given just a modicum of maths background.

But having said that, if you've written in any other programming language, then you'll breeze through a lot of the texr. It's just a question of picking up Perl's syntax.

Where things might get slightly hairy are when references are discussed. Like in C or C++, some beginners find this awkward. It's been mentioned by others that in general, in computing, one of the dividing lines in understanding is the topic of references (and pointers). It doesn't seem to be a strong function of how well an author explains it, but more of the student's intrinsic aptitude for the field.

Hopefully, you will find Lee's explanations lucid.

Beginning Perl is a great introduction and resource. It does assume the reader has some basic prior programming experience, but either way it is very logical and easy to follow. The book is well-organized so that you can easily find what you need. There are tips and shortcuts strategically placed throughout the book to help you along the way.

I bought this book very recently, having no prior experience with Perl. I had seen a couple of scripts that other people had written, but since I have minimal programming experience I could only somewhat figure out what they were intended for.

I read the first chapter of Beginning Perl (11 pages), and read bits and pieces of the second chapter (37 pages). Then I began writing my first Perl scripts, using the book primarily for reference. It makes a great reference tool because the index is very thorough and the examples are easy to understand without necessarily reading the entire book in order. About 3 hours ago I couldn't have told you what a subroutine was or how to create a hash, but now I have completed my first interactive program using subroutines, hashes, various types of loops, error-checking, etc. That would have taken me weeks to learn if I had not discovered this book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning Perl.

I read Beginning Perl, 2nd Ed (BP2E) to gain some familiarity with Perl 5. I do not plan to really write anything in Perl, but I find myself using other people's code quite a bit! In those situations I would like to know how the code works. I also enjoy being able to make small changes if the code does not work as expected. Perl is basically everywhere, so it pays to understand it to some degree.

James Lee's book is excellent from start to finish. I found his explanations very clear and his writing style lively. He covered just about everything I hoped to read in a book of roughly 400 pages. The book is ideal for the self-educated since it contains exercises with answers in the back. I personally enjoyed learning more about regular expressions in Ch 7, since PCRE is an important part of several network security tools.

It is easy to take a good programming book for granted. I have started and stopped reading several other books written to teach programming because their style is terrible and the assumptions they make confuse the beginner. BP2E is always conscious of what the reader has already seen. The author makes it clear when a briefly mentioned topic will be more thoroughly explained later in the book. Plenty of technical authors could learn from this example.

Even if you plan to read the author's new book -- Beginning Perl 6 (or BP3E) -- you may want to read BP2E. Perl 5 will be with us for many more years, so it pays to understand the material in BP2E. (It's possible that BP3E could demonstrate Perl 5 and 6 syntax, but I doubt it.)

Beginning Perl really is an excellent resource for anyone looking to learn the language - novice to expert. Even if you have absolutely no programming experience, the book starts out from the beginning by covering not only things you will need to know to learn Perl, but also good general programming practices. If you are an expert programmer, the book is written in a way that makes it easy to scan through and pick up on some things that you may not know or refresh your memory on some things that may not be completely clear. The index in the back is also great for use as a reference. Nothing can compare to the usefulness of a good Internet search engine (see Google) for use as a reference, but the book does quite a good job. It is nice to have something tangible in front of you to walk you through some tutorials and build up your knowledge of the language in a methodical way.

Personally, the book has helped me to become comfortable using Perl to do "everyday tasks" (everyday in the context of an obsessive computer user), perform my necessary job functions (manipulating massive text files), and become a better programmer. I used to know next to nothing about Perl, although I did have a solid background in other languages. With this book, and some help from the Internet, I was able to become a sufficient Perl programmer within a week.

Perl is a great language that every person in the computing field should know. There's literally hundreds of great tutorials and books on the subject that will suffice, but I would stress the value of having a well-written book sitting in front of you while you learn. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn Perl.

I've yet to really dig into this book, but it looks very promising. So far I am not disappointed with my purchase.

I know several programming languages and wanted to use Perl on my website. Within days I was able to take existing scripts and modify them to use on my site. I was able to generate several program to help maintain the site within weeks. Great book!

This is the first and from what I found "ONLY" book for a novice. I have read numerous titles on Perl and was always left with basic questions. If you want to understand Perl, read this book.

Like my title of the review reads, if you have computer science background and just starting with PERL, this is the book for you. It teaches PERL the way computer science people are taught programming languages like C, FORTRAN etc. Starts with basics and proceeds in systematic and logical way. It is an easy read and will get you up and running in less than 2 days.

I have several years experience in programming, but I didn't know anything about Perl. I bought this book because of the good reference I read in Amazon, and they weren't wrong. The authors do a great job describing with a very simple and direct language all topics. The book is full of examples, and practically after each paragraph there is some code you can try in your computer. All the code in the book works fine, there are no errors and if you don't want to type it, you can download it from the Apress web site. The explanation of every piece of code is clear, simple and enjoyable, you can't get lost.

I give 4 starts to the book because the chapter where describes how to download the DBI, CGI and other modules, it didn't work for me, and this is the only part of the book I found a little confuse. In order to download all the modules you need, simply follow this rules:
- Type "ppm" in the command line
- Type "install DBI"
- Type "install CGI"
- Type "install DBD-mysql"
- And finally type "quit"

As well you can downloads from the "apachefriend" website the complete installation of Perl, MySql, etc. All these process is very straightforward and you are ready to go.
The second reason why I didn't give 5 stars is because I was expecting an appendix with the references for the most common methods of the CGI module to create HTML tags, but it doesn't have anything, just what is in the chapter and that is not enough.

This is definitely a book for beginners (just like me) and I strongly recommend it. I enjoyed my experience studying with this book, and now I want go further with a more advanced book. I wish the authors could write a second episode of Perl.