My favourite book on Perl. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

---

Product Description

"Learning Perl", better known as "the Llama book", starts the programmer on the way to mastery. Written by three prominent members of the Perl community who each have several years of experience teaching Perl around the world, this latest edition has been updated to account for all the recent changes to the language up to Perl 5.8. Perl is the language for people who want to get work done. It started as a tool for UNIX system administrators who needed something powerful for small tasks. Since then, Perl has blossomed into a full-featured programming language used for web programming, database manipulation, XML processing, and system administration - on practically all platforms - while remaining the favorite tool for the small daily tasks it was designed for. You might start using Perl because you need it, but you'll continue to use it because you love it. Informed by their years of success at teaching Perl as consultants, the authors have re-engineered the Llama to better match the pace and scope appropriate for readers getting started with Perl, while retaining the detailed discussion, thorough examples, and eclectic wit for which the Llama is famous. The book includes new exercises and solutions so you can practice what you've learned while it's still fresh in your mind. Here are just some of the topics covered: data structures, minimal matching, threading, data parsing, references, objects, modules, and package implementation. If you ask Perl programmers today what book they relied on most when they were learning Perl, you'll find that an overwhelming majority will point to the Llama. With good reason. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #302911 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 283 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
When it comes to working a little "behind the scenes" magic for a Web site or putting together a UNIX script which interrogate databases and produce reports based on the information they contain, there are few better languages to do the job than Perl.

Learning Perl draws on the expertise of two of the major supporters of this highly flexible language, Randal Schwatrz and Tom Christiansen, to produce an introductory manual which manages to be concise yet informative throughout.

Weighing in at a mere (for a computer manual) 271 pages it achieves admirably what it sets out to do--teach Perl basics and no more. From the introduction to the different variable types through hash arrays, file access, process management and coding for the World Wide Web, it's a well-paced easy-to-understand book which assumes a rudimentary knowledge of programming but no more.

With its multitude of clear examples which help to hammer home the many points made and set exercises at the end of each chapter, it builds knowledge rather than drowning the reader with information as many other books seem to do.

This is the first in a series of books on the subject from O'Reilly Publishing, the others being Programming Perl, Advanced Perl Programming and the Perl Cookbook and it truly is a great introduction to a language which is enthusiastically supported by developers and Web coders worldwide. Well worth a read.

Review
"This book can be summed up as a solid introduction to Perl v5.8. There's no quick way to learn a language but finding time to work though this book will put you in good stead. Anyone past the basics of the language would be better off splashing out on "Perl Cookbook " or "Learning Perl". - Greg Matthews, news@UK, September 2005

Richard Mateosian, IEEE, Jan/Feb 2002
This is the book to measure all others against.

---

Customer Reviews

i like it!
my first encounter with computer programming was in 1990 when i somehow purchased a book about C++; c was almost synonumous to me with computers at that time and i remember making the assumption that ++ "probably means it is twice as good"! needless to say that other than impressing my dad with a huge book, it literally put me off computer languages for nearly a decade. i had a brief fling with java in 1998, but before i got through all the marketing hype time was up when my gf started calling me a nerd. i recently realized that i desperately need to do the simple things that i want, rather than adapt my needs to what is commercially availabe, and pay hundreds for the 95% of features i'd never use. i encountered scripting languages, python and perl, during my transitional conversion to linux, and the promise of something easier was thrilling, i got larry's (programming perl) and though having it for a couple of weeks i was unable to write any perl scripts, he seemed to go on and on and his "witty" remarks and "culture" stuff became irritating as i realized i was not going to benefit much from reading the huge book. i encountered this book - learning perl - in the local bookstore and the impulse was too strong to resist, i started browsing it on the toilet seat and found myself comfortably staying there for almost an hour, the book seemed quite engaging and the simplicity of it readlly made me happy; i simply felt "i can do it" regarding all the things that i wanted my computer to do. it strikes me now that i can adapt my machine to my needs rather than adapt my needs to what my machine can do through the applications i have. also the potential for an infinite amount of fun! (if u ever needed to spend time wondering which language to choose, choose perl; it took me a few weeks to find out, python is simply not mature enough, perl has CPAN and lots of source code samples on the web, python seems a bit simpler but to actually reinvent things is not at all convenient when there is aleady a perl module on cpan or some source code in a cgi repository site somewhere).. i hope this helps, it cost me some time to reach this conslusion so i hope it'll save u that.

O'Reilly does it again - an invaluable introduction
This is how introductions to programming languages should be written. A friendly, easy-to-follow, sequential chapter-based approach takes the beginner through the basics of Perl, building up to incredibly complex tasks. A great deal of detail on regular expressions and their use has helped me understand them completely where other books (and a course at university) have failed. The examples are thorough and well-documented with model solutions, and the index is comprehensive if you want to use this book as a reference. It doesn't go into detail on CGI or object-oriented Perl, which the book "Programming Perl" covers in more detail, so if you have specific tasks to do then "Programming Perl" may be more up your street. If you're interested in learning Perl for Unix system administration or web services (or virus writing!) then tackle this book first - it's a brilliant helping hand to guide the unwary newbie through an absolute minefield.

Another good book from O'Reilly
O'Reilly did it again. This one sits on my bookshelf now, almost never referred to. It was handy when learning perl, but since then I have tended to use the more advanced O'Reilly perl books. I finished with this one in a few days.

After all, once you have learned a language, you do not want a tutorial in it, you want a reference.

However, I cannot fault the quality of the book for doing what it says on the front: it teaches you perl, and makes that progress about as much fun as it could be in the progress. Like Programming Perl, I found I could read this book from cover to cover, almost like a good novel (well, OK, not exactly like, but it's a lot less dry than almost any other computing text I have read).

I would not recommend buying just this book if you want to use perl regularly. Buy "Programming Perl" as well, at a minimum, since that is a more complete reference. But if all you want is an easy but thorough tutorial, you will not find a better one than this. It will get you up and running fast, and with a smile on your face.