Books for a relative Perl newbie

[Andrew Wilson]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 10:12:00AM +0100, 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.
> 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.

Indeed, the camel is *the* acknowledged reference on perl, you won't go
far wrong with it.

> > 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 would just learn perl if I was you

> 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.

Why?  Asking as someone who did modperl programming before any other CGI
stuff.

> > 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.:)

Learning perl is a great little introduction to the language, It's the
first book I read/worked through.

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

While this may be true, it generally a crap idea.  perl is not c, idioms
that are a great way to do things in c are a crap way to do it in perl.
Try to learn idiomatic perl.  Having said that, you don't need to learn
it all at once.

One piece of advice.  Always, always always turn on warnings and use strict.

There are various perl beginner lists, which I'm told are a good place to
learn from better coders, but I've never read them and can't really
recommend them from personal experience.

andrew
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