Programming Perl (Nutshell Handbook) [Taschenbuch]

But ... somewhere in the extensive revisions, additions, extensions, and deletions that transformed the first Camel book into this, the second Camel book, the magic went away. And some very suspicious stuff went in. The book lost its digressive, essayic feel and became more of a perfunctory reference work. Additionally, some of the completely new material turned out to be just a little ... strange. The discussion of object-oriented programming based around the term "thingy" just doesn't do it for me. (Ignore all that and read Damian Conway's book instead.)

Preferences of style and tone aside, an unavoidable flaw of an infrequently-updated book like this one is that it inevitably refers to an obsolescent version of Perl. If you want current Perl documentation, you need to read the man(ual) pages that came with that version of Perl. What's in this book is generally but not completely accurate for newer versions of Perl. And because it's intended to be a more or less complete reference covering even small details, it can't help but be dead wrong on some points as the language continues to evolve. Bear in mind, also, that much of the material in this book comes STRAIGHT from the man pages. (Just not the up-to-date versions.)

A third edition is in the works, which will no doubt be at least a temporary improvement. If the newer version restores the insight and charm of the original, it will certainly deserve a place on your programming bookshelf. But as a reference work intended to cover a constantly-evolving language, Programming Perl will always suffer by being out of date.

If you are the type who dislikes reading electronic documentation, by all means, buy a copy of this book. But you'll find that you have to use the online documentation anyway.

1. The book is not intended to the ones who have no programming experience at all. The read should be at least an intermediate programmer, because the basic programming concepts of the language (Variables, Subs and etc..) are badly explained.

2. Because of Perl's C Like Syntax, it is recommended that the reader will know C, Awk, or Grep and Some experience in the Unix Environment.

3. The Book itself is badly organized, certain complicated things are shown in examples and explanations, and those things are taught many pages afterwards. For Example: An Example of a perl program is shown on page 10, and that example contains subs and pattern matching, which are taught 100 Pages later!

These are the 3 Main Disadvantages. For Conclusion, if you're new to programming, or want to learn Perl easliy, buy "Learning Perl", but if you're a somewhat experienced programmer, and want to master Perl, this book is the best one you'll find for that purpose.

I think that it really depends on your learning style, and your preivous experience with programming and computers in general (especially Unix).

One thing that seems to be the trend almost everwhere, which I agree with, is that this is not a very good book to learn perl with, if you have no idea what it is, or if you haven't had previous experience with other programming languages. A book better suited for this introductory task is one such as Learning Perl (the 'Llama Book') or one of the other 'tutorial' type books.

However, the Camel book IS well suited as a reference book, and I also enjoy just opening the book in the middle somewhere, and starting to read. I almost always learn some little trick or useful technique within the first few pages that I read, some of which solve a problem which I may be working on, and some I store away and am glad later on when something comes up and I can think "Oh yeah...to do this you just do this and that..." Plus if I don't remember, out comes the book again...at least I know it's in there somewhere, even if the index isn't perfect :-)

If I had to sum it up in two words, they would be the same as many other readers: GET IT!