[Kc] Book Review -- Learning Perl 4th Edition

[Andrew Moore]

Thanks, Jonathan!

I'm pretty sure that O'Reilly will give a free copy of many of their
recent books that they publish to any members who would like to write
a book review. If there's one that any of you are interested in
reviewing for the group, let me know and I can help you get a copy.

-Andy


On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 10:52:50PM -0500, djgoku wrote:
> Learning Perl 4th Edition
> Authors: Randal L. Schwartz, Tome Phoenix & brian d foy
> ISBN: 0-596-10105-8
> http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/
> 
> Review by Jonathan C. Otsuka
> Kansas City Perl Mongers
> http://kc.pm.org
> 2007-10-04
> 
> I have put off this review of Learning Perl 4th Edition for well over
> a year now. One reason I let this go so long is I didn't think at the
> time after reading it that I was good enough to write a review about
> something so new to learn. I know now that this book was only the
> beginning into learning a new language, and that only reading one book
> can't make you an expert (and I don't claim to be one yet).
> 
> After reading Learning Perl. Here are a list of things taught in the
> book that make me use Perl more and more.
> 
> Scalar data is a really neat and easy way of storing data used in Perl
> programs. You don't have to know exactly what type it is going to be
> an int, char, float, string you just create a variable and store the
> data unlike you have to do in C/C++.
> 
> Having an easy way of iterating through arrays or hashes is very
> simple using a for loop. Hashes are a really neat data structure like
> arrays which instead of using numbers as indexes you use whatever you
> like as a index which is then use to retrieve a stored value.
> 
> Perl is very strong at searching scalar data. Searching strings and
> matching a particular string is made easy with regular expressions.
> 
> Another thing which isn't talked about much is CPAN and using modules
> others have created to make your job as the programmer even easier.
> 
> I will have to say this book was a very good introduction into Perl (I
> still use it from time to time as a reference). It has really helped
> me in getting the basic syntax of Perl down. I would totally recommend
> this book to anyone that is wanting to begin the journey into
> programming with Perl.
> 
> Jonathan
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