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Summary: Finally a Perl book you can learn by...
Review: ....This is HONESTLY the first book I have found (yes!) that really tries to TEACH the reader. I can be anywhere (not just in front of my system) and read through and learn and learn the stuff I need to know, useful stuff. I have went through them all folks, and Clinton Pierce deserves many kudos for how he laid out and wrote this book. Typos are a minimum but I found several source listings that had a different variable name (in particular, FILEHANDLE name) than was mentioned in the source code explanation following. So far, so good, this book has saved me from having to hire a Perl programmer (for the time being).
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Summary: Unhelpful
Review: As a Perl neophyte, the book was totally unhelpful. It did not describe clearly the most basic functions a new user would want to know like reading a file, parsing it, matching patterns, etc. Look elsewhere.
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Summary: How to get your hands dirty quick
Review: As with the other titles in the Sam's Teach Yourself xxx in 24 Hours series, this book aims at quickly arming you with enough knowledge of Perl to start programming in the language in no time. If you are a complete newbie to programming, this book is not for you, because it takes a "focus on the trees, ignore the forest" approach. In other words, you are thrown into coding right away. There's no high-level discussion of data structures and programming gotchas, etc. There's a lot of stuff crammed into each lesson, and some of the lessons will likely take more than an hour (and more than one pass) to understand. While this is not a reference at all, and many subtle details are omitted (which is actually a bad thing in the long run because Perl is such a complicated language), the book does get you started quickly. A lot of practical examples are given to show you how the language works, and many of the snippets included can be used in your actual programming endeavors. For example, you can take the code to find unique elements in a list as is and use it without any modification (save for using your own variable names).
If you already have some programming background and need just one book to learn Perl quickly, this is the book for you. After this, I'd recommend the "camel book", i.e., "Programming Perl" published by O'Reilly, which gives a forest-over-trees treatment to the language, plus it contains a useful reference on the language.
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Summary: SAMS does it again! A must for every webmaster!
Review: Forget the CGI Cookbook, this is the book you really need if you want to learn the ins and outs of perl without muss 'n' fuss. The lessons are simple to follow but still contain valuable information for the perl novice. For those who are already incorporating perl scripts into their websites, TYP in 24 hrs is the perfect tool for understanding the syntax and functions of many common perl-cgi scripts. With just a little practice and patience, you too can be putting together your own perl programs for on-line use! I highly recommend this book. Even those who are not familiar with free-form programming methods will find the instructional methods superb! Those familiar with even BASIC programming will find the descriptions and analogies simple to follow. SAMS does it again!
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Summary: this is definitely a great book
Review: I concur with the previous review. I bought this book, one month and a half ago and I am now very efficiently programming a lot of interesting little programs. I was programming 10 years ago but stopped practicing since then and I recently wanted to program a few things related to language processing (for which perl turns out to be marvelously appropriated). This book enable me to get working almost immediately. It's full of useful and practical advice that enabled me to get to the core of learning perl. I never learned a language so quickly and with so amazing results. If you have a project (like a research or a prototyping project -- as I do ) to handle while reading this book, you will probably find that this book really help you get into it. As far as I am concerned the book help me start implementing my ideas almost immediately. Of course at the beginning my implementations were inefficient and clumsy but the book progressively me understand how to do it better and more efficiently. This is an extremely good way to learn as it is both concrete, "feedbackfull' and help to understand why and how this perl language is useful. The only reservation I would express concerns regular expression were the book does provide all the basics but des not give enough example on how to combine this knowledge. Don't misundertstand me: it did help me get introduced to regular expressions (to the point that I use them almost daily now) but I felt the need for more materials and practical examples on this important aspect of the perl language.
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Summary: Not for Beginners
Review: I found this book very frustrating. The format is that you read and then maybe at the end of the chapter there is an exercise and some activities that I don't know what they have to do with the reading material. Perhaps for those who have experience in C++ or some other language it would work but I have had a little Visual Basic and am not very experienced in programming and this does not do for me what I need in a book and what it claims to do, take me from scratch, assuming I know nothing and building on that. There are too many steps that are skipped. Also there are typos. Notice that he misspelled "sherbet" as "sherbert" "Sherbet" is often misprounouced it doesn't rhyme with "herbert" and a supposedly educated man should not make that error.
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Summary: The best written Perl book
Review: I had a necessity to learn Perl and use it immediately on my Job. While I was browsing through volumes and volumes of books written on Perl, I was lucky to find this book. This was one of the best introductory books written on Perl. It keeps you awake and gives the right amount of Perl knowledge to start implementing it right away. I will be looking out for any other books written by Clinton Pierce, on computer programming.
Rating:
Summary: The best written Perl book
Review: I had a necessity to learn Perl and use it immediately on my Job. While I was browsing through volumes and volumes of books written on Perl, I was lucky to find this book. This was one of the best introductory books written on Perl. It keeps you awake and gives the right amount of Perl knowledge to start implementing it right away. I will be looking out for any other books written by Clinton Pierce, on computer programming.
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Summary: super
Review: i have unix cgi web exper........ but i still love to read a book where the author talks to u! he's great!
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Summary: Excellent beginner's guide
Review: I'm a self-taught web designer who could never quite capture the essence of perl. However, I knew I needed it in my bag of tricks to complete some of the projects I had coming up. I found this book amidst a ton of others on the subject, but chose it because I have had success with other "Teach Yourself" books by SAMS. And I was not disappointed this time, either. As one reviewer mentioned, it is not a "dry" book, it keeps and holds your attention as you learn. Nor were there any typos in my version of the book. Kudos! My employers are impressed with my newfound skills.
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