Programming Perl (Nutshell Handbook) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

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!

"The authors aren't afraid to use a construct before they've even mentioned it, let alone described how it works, and at least some of the (mostly uncommented) examples are distinctly non-trivial. It's very dense, with a single sentence often expressing something that I'd spend a whole pp on, were I writing it for a programmer's magazine. It's not quite as slow going as some of the page-an-hour philosophy texts I read in college, but it's probably the closest I've come to that in the nearly twenty years since then. Definite perceptual bi-stability: It flickers between 'loads of fun' and 'intensely frustrating'."

Having finished it and having written more than a few Perl scripts, I find it an invaluable reference - I look forward to the day when I can write a non-trivial script without referring to it!

All in all, I found it a wonderful book, the One Book To Get If You're Only Getting One. I do think that the density of the book (and its free use of 'forward references') is a good preparation for Perl programming: If you can understand the book and its examples, you'll have little trouble reading any Perl you might come across.

But - as you can gather from some of the pans here - this book isn't for everyone. If you already know two or three other languages and have a deep-seated need to understand a language's semantics, buy this book. If what you really want is just to quickly learn how to modify some scripts you found on the Net, then this probably isn't the book for you.