[oak perl] Can anyone recommend a good web site to learn perl?

[david wright]

--- On Sun, 12/30/07, Joe Brenner <doom at kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
> From: Joe Brenner <doom at kzsu.stanford.edu>
> Subject: Re: [oak perl] Can anyone recommend a good web site to learn perl?
> To: "Oakland Perl Mongers" <oakland at pm.org>
> Date: Sunday, December 30, 2007, 8:34 PM
> David Fetter <david at fetter.org> wrote:
> > Dan Dascalescu wrote:
> > > David Fetter <david at fetter.org> wrote:
> > > > Michael wrote:
> 
> > > > > I have been programming in perl for a
> few years, but am always
> > > > > looking to expland my experience.  Has
> anyone come across a good
> > > > > site?
> 
> > > > Any of Randal Schwartz's books from
> O'Reilly should do.  Ask before
> > > > buying any other O'Reilly titles, as the
> quality varies widely.
> > >
> > > In my opinion, the best web site to learn Perl
> that I know of, is
> > >
> http://www.sthomas.net/oldpages/roberts-perl-tutorial.htm
> >
> > After a quick browse through that one, I just plain
> can't agree.  The
> > idioms used in there are basically from perl4, and a
> lot of the
> > recommendations, in my humble opinion, are just plain
> wrong.
> 
> Um... I can't say it looks quite that bad to me, though
> there are things
> I might complain about (it delays talking about "use
> strict;" for too
> long, for example).
> 
> I would suggest starting here:
> 
>   http://perldoc.perl.org/perlintro.html
> 
> (which is the same content as "man perlintro" on
> a unix box).


Here are some additional resources you may want to consider.

If you've been programming in perl a few years, you probably know about these two books.

Learning Perl
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperl3/index.html

Intermediate Perl
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/intermediateperl/index.html

if not your should pick those up and go through them. (do the exercises) Otherwise here are some must have books.

Books:

1. Perl Best Practices
By Damian Conway
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlbp/

- defacto, current state of the art, a must own!


2. Object Oriented Perl
http://www.manning.com/conway/

- another great conway book, older but 'thee' perl OO book

sample:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/PDF/cyberdigest.pdf


3. Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perltestingadn/

- increase the quality of your code apply xp and tdd practices to perl.


Module I find handy:

http://search.cpan.org/~thaljef/criticism-1.01/lib/criticism.pm
use criticism 'brutal';

- this enforces many best practices and increases maintainable coding practices



Online:

try a search for something interesting on http://search.cpan.org/
try to use a module you've never used, read it's code, etc. also, in general read the code of well known perl coders.


perl and design patterns:
http://perldesignpatterns.com/?PerlDesignPatterns
- perl as it relates to design patterns, more OOP


http://affy.blogspot.com/p5be/index.htm
Welcome to Perl 5 by Example
by David Medinets
- an older resource (has many non PBP examples..) but has lots of thought provoking exercises, since IMHO, you learn perl by using it.

although, generally I'm wary of any site that has the terms 'learn perl' and 'CGI scripting.' in the same paragraph. It usually means it hasn't been updated for years...


HTH,

david