Rating: 
Summary: Nearly Perfect Reference Guide
Review: With the addition of an index and references to perldoc commands, and updated material for Perl 5.6, this reference guide is virtually all a Perl programmer needs. To steal from Larry Wall's Foreward from this book, it's really hard to write a review about something this perfect.I do wish the book had some extra material: a link to where to get a copy of Perl, some tips on using the -w switch and "use strict" to find bugs, an explanation of the basic perldoc options, a link to the Perl newsgroups and guidelines for posting to them, a few more choice examples of code. To steal from Larry's Foreward again, this information would have made things ever so much easier if I'd had it *before* I started writing in Perl... Update: I'm not sure why other reviewers are saying that this reference is not very useful. Until today, this book has been my only Perl reference for over a year and thousands of lines of Perl code, except for occasionally using perl's built-in help. I did refer to Programming Perl today to find how to make a hash slice on a hash reference that is stored in a hash, but unless you're writing something complicated like that, this pocket reference tells you how to do it. If you really can think of something that's missing, be sure to visit the O'Reilly web site and give them the feedback!
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