My Review of Learning Perl, 5th Edition

Feb 18, 2012 in REVIEWS
reviews
3 min read
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    Making Easy Things Easy and Hard Things Possible
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  <a href="http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596520113.do" style="display: none;" class="url fn"><span class="fn">Learning Perl, 5th Edition</span></a></div> 
  
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    <strong class="summary">Great intro to Perl</strong>
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    By <strong>Jim Schubert</strong> from <strong>Richmond, VA</strong> on <strong><abbr title="2012218T1200-0800" class="dtreviewed" style="border: none; text-decoration: none;">2/18/2012</abbr></strong>
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    <span class="rating">5</span>out of 5
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    <strong>Pros: </strong>Helpful examples, Easy to understand, Concise, Well-written, Accurate
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    <strong>Best Uses: </strong>Novice, Student
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    <strong>Describe Yourself: </strong>Software Engineer
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    I picked up this book on a whim to learn Perl. I was extremely impressed, especially by the three chapters on Regular Expressions.<br xmlns:pr="xalan://com.pufferfish.core.beans.xmlbuilders.xsl.Functions" /><br />If you have used Perl, this book may be fairly basic. There are whole chapters on Scalars, Arrays, Hashes, etc. I have a lot of experience in a lot of languages and technologies, and I can tell you this book is well-written and well-organized to ease you into the Perl mindset.
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    First of all, most languages are like mathematics. 1+1=2 is a rule. If that rule didn&#8217;t work, math wouldn&#8217;t work. Similarly, &#8216;int x = 1;&#8217; in C-style languages will always point the variable &#8216;x&#8217; to the memory location storing the value of &#8216;1&#8217;. Rules are rules. However, Perl is contextual. When you do one thing in Perl, you may have a different result depending on the context of the code. For example (extremely-generalized example), hashes can be considered an array of values in which every even index is the key and every odd index is the value. So, an array of [&#8220;first&#8221;, &#8220;1st&#8221;, &#8220;second&#8221;, &#8220;2nd&#8221; ] could easily become a hash with the keys and values related as expected. Weird? Yes. Basic, not really. I think that can be a very difficult concept for a lot of people&#8230; too meta.
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    The book does a great job of easing a lot of the Perl concepts onto the reader. Interestingly, the part of the book I found the most useful are the three Regular Expressions chapters. I have recommended this book to students in the past solely for the three Regular Expressions chapters. They are clearly and concisely written in a way that presents the Perl syntax very well.
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    If you&#8217;re familiar with Perl already, this book probably isn&#8217;t for you. You would probably be better off with the Intermediate Perl book also available by O&#8217;Reilly. Even after reading both books and working a bit with the Catalyst framework, I found myself coming back to the last chapter of this book to fully understand eval blocks.
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