Product Description

Perl is a versatile, powerful programming language used in a variety of disciplines, ranging from system administration to web programming to database manipulation. One slogan of Perl is that it makes easy things easy and hard things possible. "Intermediate Perl" is about making the leap from the easy things to the hard ones. This book offers a gentle but thorough introduction to intermediate programming in Perl. Written by the authors of the best-selling "Learning Perl", it picks up where that book left off. Topics include: Packages and namespaces; references and scoping; manipulating complex data structures; object-oriented programming; writing and using modules; testing Perl code; and contributing to CPAN. Following the successful format of "Learning Perl", we designed each chapter in the book to be small enough to be read in just an hour or two, ending with a series of exercises to help you practice what you've learned. To use the book, you just need to be familiar with the material in "Learning Perl" and have ambition to go further. Perl is a different language to different people. It is a quick scripting tool for some, and a fully-featured object-oriented language for others. It is used for everything from performing quick global replacements on text files, to crunching huge, complex sets of scientific data that take weeks to process. Perl is what you make of it. But regardless of what you use Perl for, this book helps you do it more effectively, efficiently, and elegantly. "Intermediate Perl" is about learning to use Perl as a programming language, and not just a scripting language. This is the book that turns the Perl dabbler into the Perl programmer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121436 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From the Publisher
Perl programmers need a clear roadmap for improving their skills. Intermediate Perl teaches a working knowledge of Perl's objects, references, and modules -- all of which makes the language so versatile and effective. Written by the authors of the bestselling Llama book, Learning Perl, this guide offers a gentle but thorough introduction to intermediate programming in Perl. Topics include packages and namespaces, references and scoping, manipulating complex data structures, writing and using modules, package implementation, and using CPAN.

About the Author
Randal L. Schwartz is a renowned expert on the Perl programming language. In addition to writing "Learning Perl" and the first two editions of "Programming Perl", he has been the Perl columnist for UNIX Review, Web Techniques, Sys Admin, and Linux Magazine. He has contributed to a dozen Perl books, and over 200 magazine articles. Randal runs a Perl training and consulting company (Stonehenge Consulting Services), and is highly sought-after as a speaker for his combination of technical skill, comedic timing, and crowd rapport. He's also a pretty good Karaoke singer.

brian d foy has been an instructor for Stonehenge Consulting Services since 1998. He founded the first Perl user group, the New York Perl Mongers, as well as the Perl advocacy nonprofit Perl Mongers, Inc., which helped form more than 200 Perl user groups across the globe. He maintains the perlfaq portions of the core Perl documentation, several modules on CPAN, and some stand-alone scripts. He's the publisher of The Perl Review and is a frequent speaker at conferences. His writings on Perl appear on The O'Reilly Network and use.perl.org, and in The Perl Journal, Dr. Dobbs Journal, and The Perl Review.

Tom Phoenix has been working in the field of education since 1982. After more than thirteen years of dissections, explosions, work with interesting animals, and high-voltage sparks during his work at a science museum, he started teaching Perl classes for Stonehenge Consulting Services, where he's worked since 1996. Since then, he has traveled to many interesting locations, so you might see him soon at a Perl Mongers' meeting. When he has time, he answers questions on Usenet's comp.lang.perl.misc and comp.lang.perl.moderated newsgroups, and contributes to the development and usefulness of Perl. Besides his work with Perl, Perl hackers, and related topics, Tom spends his time on amateur cryptography and speaking Esperanto. His home is in Portland, Oregon.

Customer Reviews

Good follow up to the Llama, but poorly organised
If you've mastered The Llama (Learning Perl), make haste to read this one. Even if you only want to do scripting with Perl, you'll eventually find you need data structures slightly more complicated than just flat arrays and hashes, and you need to know about references for that. While Programming Perl does contain a fair chunk of material on just this subject, it was a bit too much for me to digest after The Llama. If Intermediate Perl (aka The Alpaca) had been around for me to read, I would have had a much easier time.

Written in the same style as The Llama, this breeze through most of the rest of Perl, in particular: references, objects, packages and modules. These are the bits that you need to use Perl as a general purpose programming language, not just for scripting. In a similar pragmatic vein, it also covers how to use tools to build your own packages in the CPAN style, and there's a good chunk of material on using Test::More for unit tests. Probably the only thing missing is material on type globs and symbol tables, although hopefully, brian d foy's forthcoming Mastering Perl will fill in these gaps.

The bottom line is this is Llama part 2, and you need to read it if you want to have any hope of understanding anyone else's Perl. But I can't give it five stars. The major problem is that the material is not very well organised. At the chapter level, objects are sandwiched between modules and packages. It would have been far preferable to keep the module and package information together. As a result, the distinction between modules and packages is rather muddied, and the introduction of objects in the middle just makes things worse. Overall, I found the explanations to lack the clarity of the Llama.

A more minor complaint is that, while there are mercifully fewer annoying footnotes, the Gilligan's Island theme (fellow people of Britain, read the Wikipedia article before you start) grates far sooner than the Flintstones flavour of the Llama.

That said, make this your second book on Perl. Then, _still_ don't read The Camel yet. Avail yourself of Perl Best Practices first.

An excellent teaching book
The first edition of this book was called "Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules", which is a bit of a mouthful and therefore has sensibly been renamed to "Intermediate Perl". It's the follow up book to "Learning Perl", written by the same authors so if you have finished "Learning Perl" and want to learn more Perl, then this is the book for you.

The book is designed for the reader to work from cover to cover. Basic knowledge of Perl is assumed, so you could skip "Learning Perl" if you've been using the language for a while. There are some exercises at the end of each chapter, with answers given in the Appendix. The book was originally written from courses the authors ran, so it is tuned to have an appropriate learning curve if your Perl knowledge can be summed up by "Learning Perl". Compared with "Programming Perl" it is a completely different style of book; "Programming Perl" is more of a reference book, so is useful in a different way to "Intermediate Perl". If you are looking to develop your Perl skills and want a bit of hand holding then "Intermediate Perl" will certainly help with that.

The book is written in a quite chatty manner: it covers the basics then builds up slowly to the more complex tasks of dealing with larger programs and modules. The book looks at how to write better Perl programs and introduces writing Perl modules. For a 250 page book there is certainly a lot packed into it.

Good Book, Take it Slow!
This is actually a really good book but I can't help but feel that it delves into some topics very early and this can create some confusion. I purchased this book after reading the original Learning Perl book, the first chapter of intermediate perl was very tricky for me but then it did seem to make more sense as I completed chapters. Great book if you take your time! my advice, buy this book, read it slowly, read some chapters again, and dont worry too much with questions like "Why would I ever use a reference?" until you are at least onto basic object principles.