Perl Black Book: The Most Comprehensive Perl Reference Available Today
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 4.43Customer Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent book for reference and learning
Comment: I've had several people ask me to recommend a book to get them started on Perl, and this is always the first one I suggest. It has great examples and while it may take you a few seconds to scan through the table of contents or index to find what you're looking for, it's certainly worth it, rather than having to scan several books to find what you're looking for. It probably isn't the best book for a person who has never programmed before, but if you at least know of basic programming concepts (when to use a loop, that variables are used to hold things, etc.) this book is an excellent resource. The book starts at the basics of installing, then advances through the obligatory "hello world" and text formatting to more complex things such as database calls, so it can be used by both a beginner and a more advanced programmer.
The book is mostly examples, followed by explanation and preceeded with a "conversation" between the novice programmer and the programming guru. It highlights the "new" code, drawing attention to what it is you're learning for the section, and explains what it does.
While I am prefer O'reilly books, I have found that The Perl Black Book has replaced my O'reilly Perl books and is the only Perl book I really use.
Customer Rating: 5
Summary: Everythign I had looked for
Comment: When I discovered Perl, I was a C++ programmer. I wanted to more easily manipulate textual data, and let's face it, cgi programs are just not the happenin deal when it comes to web apps. Enter Perl. At the time I bought this book, I had seen a ton of Perl scripts doing what I wanted to do, but Perl as a language seemed so foreign to me. The Black Book bridged the gap wonderfully, and it is so well written that I managed to read most of it on a car voyage from Louisiana to California (I can't even read some of my favorite novels while traveling).
The book makes learning Perl a breeze, and it comes with a CD to check out any mentioned code you want (thought there is tons of code in the book anyway). The book and CD have tons of real world scripts that you can learn from and apply to the projects you are most probably already working on. I loved this book, and I think anyone who wants to learn Perl shoul start here.
Bottom line: Probably a better learning book than reference book (although it is still a good reference), this book made Perl easily accessible to me.
Customer Rating: 5
Summary: GREAT BOOK
Comment: If you are looking for a book filled with theories-this is not the book for you.
This book is about solutions. It is filled if common programming problems - and provides you with GREAT quick and easy to use solutions. Highly recommended.
Zev Saftlas, Author of Motivation That Works: How to Get Motivated and Stay Motivated