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Summary: Excerpt from "The Perl Jounal"
Review: I am copying an excerpt from "The Perl Journal" review of this book.__START__ Summary: This is a really rotten book. Very few books are able to attain as many as eight major flaws: 1. 'Dummy' approach encourages and reinforces the reader's disability 2. Lack of concrete programming examples 3. Lack of general discussion of how to program, apart from language-specific features 4. Reference manual organization style 5. Inclusion of too many useless and abstruse features 6. Complicated explanations where simple ones are possible 7. Scaremongering and panic instead of calm explanation of affairs 8. Many, many technical errors, some very serious __END__ I taught myself Perl with little programming background (BASIC, 20 years ago). I started 1 1/2 years ago and am now using it daily as a web developer and data analyst. Learning Perl from the books and resources out there is *extremely* difficult. There were many times I could've saved 3 weeks of hammering on a script if a perl guru had said, "Hey, list context just means the function wants a list, like an array or hash." I understand very well that the O'Reilly books are godawful for a beginner b/c that's where I started and suffered long from every explanation that said simply, "It's just like in C, so we won't explain it." That said, the books are pretty terrific once you're at a level to absorb them, but steer clear before then, unless you already know everything that POSIX means. It might be tempting to pick up this book b/c there are pretty much no Perl books for those who haven't coded already. You should consider "The Elements of Perl" instead of this one. It's a better start for beginners and a wonderful way to start to understand Perl, its idioms, its culture, and how to program well. There is also "The Perl Black Book" which is a much better overview of the Perl than any single O'Reilly book, though the author isn't a guru, he's a good writer and tackles everything from the basics to advanced stuff with lots of examples and a CD with all the code. Perl is wonderful, so please do pick up a book, just not this one.
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Summary: Missing some areas
Review: I bought Learning Perl and this book at the same time. This book is ok for PERL syntax intro but lacks some useful topics found in "Learning Perl". It didn't mention about creating child processes (fork). Get the Learning Perl instead. You'll learn more.
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Summary: Go with an ora book.
Review: I bought this book and feel that it is very poor compared to other books like Programming Perl or Learning Perl (both published by ora). The author frequently rambles on in Perl for Dummies and the chapter names, although cute, tell you nothing about what is going to be described in that secton. Go with Learning Perl if you want to learn perl, or mabey Programming Perl if you already know a few other languages.
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Summary: Great Book!
Review: I bought this book hoping to expand my knowledge of Internet programming. Having never read a Perl tutorial before in my life, I was clinging to the concept of luck that I would come out with a great book rather than one to take the hassle of returning. Not only did I come out with a great book, but I came out with a great introduction, explanation, and tutorial of the Perl language, but also a VERY useful reference source. I would never have regretted purchasing this book for an instant. The author covers many of the necessary aspects of the language thoroughly, leaving me with a clear understanding of this great programming tool. The only part that could have been covered better was DBM and relational databases, although I know that that was not one of the targets of this book as a tutorial, it would have come in handy as a reference. I strongly recommend this to any one looking for a solid introduction/reference to this great language, and also to any one with previous experience in Perl. It comes in great as a reference, and you might even learn something new!
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Summary: This is a good book, but not deep enough if you already code
Review: I do quite a bit of coding already and wanted to add to my skills by adding a little PERL. I felt like this book had a lot of great information and was easy to ready, but I missed some of the more in-depth definitions you get in the O'Reilly books. Still, it was a good primer for PERL
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Summary: Perfect for the Perl Dummy
Review: I had literally zero programming experience in Perl, and only a little experience in another language when I bought this book. Fortunatley this book assumes that you know very little (if anything)about Perl (or programming for that matter). In my opinion, the ONLY way to learn a programming language is to start from the beginning and work your way to more advanced topics, and thats exactly what Perl for Dummies does. Even if you already know some Perl, the examples and quick references in this book are invaluable...a MUST on every Perl learners and programmers book-shelf.
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Summary: Fantastic For Perl Beginners
Review: I looked at books on programming CGI in PERL, and found most to be nothing but a collection of scripts with weak discussions of the concepts involved. The Dummies book was a great introduction to the language, and now that I understand PERL, I can look to other people's scripts for ideas rather than buy more books.
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Summary: Great Book
Review: I'm Lillian's son (i got this gift for xmas) and I love it. I'm 15 years old and understand it greatly and am making my online programs already, i love it!
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Summary: Not a good book to learn Perl
Review: I'm not sure if some of these folks were looking at the same book that I did but I cannot recommend this book but only to have as another Perl reference. I am talking about Perl for Dummies, by Hoffman, 2nd Edition. It simply was too small of a book, and it is difficult to look anything up because it only has 328 pages. The example scripts were very very limited. As soon as I reached the point I wanted to know how to do something in Perl, I had to go out and buy another book. My advice, only buy as a part of your Perl Library of books. I recommend "Perl Black Book" by Holzner as my first choice and "Perl 5" by Sybex as my second. Signed, MCP+Internet, MCSE Systems Support Specialist
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Summary: A Well Worn Book that I Love
Review: I've never been a big fan of the "Dummies" line of books because I've had some bad experiences with some of them. This book was a pleasant surprise. I wanted to learn Perl for doing CGI on the web, and I wanted to learn it quickly. This book did not dissapoint. I used it as a starting point and then moved on to the O'reilly books, which was an excellent way to do it. Here's the funny thing, I still go back to this book as a quick reference at times. There have been times that I have not been able to find the answer quickly enough in the O'reilly books and I've ended up turning back to this one. I just had one of those occasions where I quickly found a small section in this book on concatenation. It gave an excellent example. After sifting through O'reilly for a couple of hours, I wish that I had looked through this one first. With a good amount of work and concentration, you should be able to learn Perl with this book. Think of it as a starting point, because it will not likely teach you everything that you want to know. That's not the purpose of the dummies books. In conclusion, I'm very happy that I chose this book as a starting point.
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