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

djgoku djgoku at gmail.com
Thu Oct 4 20:52:50 PDT 2007


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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