Making Easy Things Easy and Hard Things Possible
Among Perl programmers, the classic instruction books are affectionately referred to according to the animals on their covers: the Camel book (Programming Perl), the Llama book (Learning Perl), and the Alpaca book (Intermediate Perl). By no means do these books make up the entire sum of knowledge about Perl; each animal merely represents a step on the path to mastery of the language.
“Learning Perl,” now in its fifth edition, serves as the traditional starting point for the programmer looking to learn Perl. As authors Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy say, “If you’re looking for the best way to spend your first 30 to 45 hours with the Perl programming language, you’ve found it.” The book is a carefully paced introduction to the language that is the workhorse of the Internet, as well as the language of choice for system administrators, web hackers, and casual programmers around the world.
This book reflects the combined experience of its authors, who have taught Perl at Stonehenge Consulting since 1991. Years of classroom testing and experience helped shape the book’s pace and scope, and this edition is packed with exercises that let you practice the concepts while you follow the text. “The fifth edition is updated for Perl 5.10, and includes a new chapter on the new smart-match feature and the given-when control structure,” says foy, when asked about the new content in the book, adding, “We also expanded the regular expression chapters for new regex features.”
Topics include:
- Perl data & variable types
- Subroutines
- File operations
- Regular expressions
- String manipulation
- Lists & sorting
- Process management
- Smart matching
- Using third party modules
Originally relied on by sys admins for heavy-duty text processing, Perl is now a full-featured programming language suitable for almost any task on almost any platform-from short fixes on the command line to web applications, bioinformatics, finance, and much more. “The killer feature of Perl is CPAN, which has over 15,000 third party Modules,” explains foy. “To access that huge library of work, you need to use Perl.”
Learning Perl, Fifth Edition
Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy
328 pages, US $39.99
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