Books for a relative Perl newbie

Marty Pauley marty+belfast-pm at kasei.com
Wed Sep 4 05:15:52 CDT 2002


On Wed Sep  4 10:12:00 2002, Russell Matbouli wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 02:46:53AM +0100, Mark Harrigan wrote:
> > I'm considering learning Perl and would like some recommendations on
> > what books would be good to start with.
> 
> The Camel Book, "Programming Perl", Wall et al, O'Reilly and Associates.

"Learning Perl" is popular when learning Perl.  It might be the title...
"Essential Perl Programming" (not an O'Reilly book) seemed ok.

> It'll skin you £30 odd though. You can find all that information in the
> online perldocs [0] and tutorials though, or at least enough to get you
> up and running.
> 
> > I'm aiming to learn it for use in web programming ie mod_perl so any
> > books that concentrated on that would be good. Or should I just learn it
> > in a general way with something like Programming Perl and apply that to
> > my web design ideas?
> 
> I'd start with CGI programming before diving into mod_perl. Once you're
> used to it, then read The Guide [1] and see what the caveats are for
> mod_perl programming compared to CGI, and learn the interfaces.

I think I'd skip CGI programming, unless you need it for something else.
I'd still start by writing scripts (using Apache::Request and
Apache::Registry) rather than diving straight into handlers.

> > If it's of any use I've learnt a bit of Perl already but only really
> > basic stuff.(Chapter one of Learning Perl sort of thing and that was a
> > while ago) I'm competant in C and C++ programming and can bash out some
> > VB if forced to at uni.:)

Chapter 2 of "Learning Perl" might be a good place to continue.

> You can probably write your C programs, the slap a perl shebang line on
> them and they'll generally Do What You Mean...

:-)

Unfortunately, too many potentially good Perl programmers have been
ruined by following that advice.  Perl written like C is usually ugly
and slow.

-- 
Marty
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