Rating: 
Summary: ONLY FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT Patience
Review: If you are looking to get started right away. This is the one. This is short and concise. It also goes into various uses of Perl, you will be start writing as you read this book. You can go through this book with in a week. It took me 5 days to finish it. Also, having the ActivePerl CD in the book is plus. Only thing is that now you need to find a book that is more intermediate.
Rating:
Summary: ONLY FOR PEOPLE WITHOUT Patience
Review: If you are looking to get started right away. This is the one. This is short and concise. It also goes into various uses of Perl, you will be start writing as you read this book. You can go through this book with in a week. It took me 5 days to finish it. Also, having the ActivePerl CD in the book is plus. Only thing is that now you need to find a book that is more intermediate.
Rating: 
Summary: its OK
Review: in the begging, the book teaches you the basics very well, i learned it very fast. As the book goes on, it becomes increasenly more boring, it almost put me to sleep. the bad thing is, the harder to learn stuff, the topics you need to really pay attention to, is the most boring of all.
Rating: 
Summary: Unhelpful
Review: It introduces Perl in an easy and effective way, with exercises and quizzes at the end of every chapter. It's not just a reference book, it's a book to learn by. It touches on Database programming in Perl and CGI programming. There isn't a better choice for a beginning Perl programmer.
Rating: 
Summary: Simply the Best
Review: It introduces Perl in an easy and effective way, with exercises and quizzes at the end of every chapter. It's not just a reference book, it's a book to learn by. It touches on Database programming in Perl and CGI programming. There isn't a better choice for a beginning Perl programmer.
Rating:
Summary: Great for Windows users doing CGI
Review: Most of the perl books assume you've got a Unix machine to run them on. This one doesn't at all. All of the differences between Unix and Windows are pointed out. This book has both great things, it's a great tutorial and the examples work under Windows 95.The CGI programs run great under Personal Web Server without modification and are a great help in getting a personal site started up. Theyre clearly explained too.
Rating:
Summary: To be honest...not that great.
Review: Reading this book is kind of like riding a bicycle for the first time. First, you sit on the bike and place your feet on the pedals - in the beginning of the book, you slowly learn about variables, arrays and how Perl programs are constructed. So far, everything's doing great. You're understanding everything that is being said to you, then all of a sudden you get pushed down a huge hill going at a very fast speed. Before you know it, you crashed. That's how it is reading Clinton's book. The beginning is great - great introduction and you start to feel your confidence grow as you tell yourself, 'I can do this!' After Chapter 5, everything goes chaotic. Clinton slams difficult tasks in your face without providing any answers or solutions to his exercises. After every chapter, there is a quiz that gives you around 3 questions and answers about the chapter you just read. The book then provides you with very difficult exercises that have no solutions provided for you. I felt very lost and disorganized on some chapters that describe regular expressions and filehandles. The author has two different chapters on files - one for filehandles and one for opening, reading, and writing files. That was one of the most common sense things Clinton should've done: Kept all the file(s) information in ONE chapter instead of spreading it out between 2 chapters that are half length of the book away from each other. Another problem that kept arousing were his code examples. A lot of his code included extra garble that was not necessary for successful completion of the program. Also, a lot of his examples did not work properly. On one of the other chapters that discussed databases, Clinton wrote an database look-up program that you could look up people by their e-mail address or phone number. The problem with that was you couldn't add any people to the database using his code and I had to modify it extensively to get it to work. I had to get help from other sources throughout that chapter and throughout his book to accomplish the tasks.
I will tell you that I did learn the fundamentals of Perl using this book, but there were many, many times that I wanted to throw it against the wall. I highly recommend two books instead of Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours. For people who want to learn Perl and learn it well, check out Randal L. Schwartz & Tom Phoenix's 'Learning Perl 3rd Edition' by O'Reilly publishing. That book creates an amazing foundation to master Perl AND provides answers to all the exercises. People who would like to learn the basics of Perl with extensive CGI programming, check out Jacqueline D. Hamilton's 'CGI Programming 101: Perl for the World Wide Web.' Jackie's book is an amazing piece of literature that provides you with great coding examples that work and are understanding. She even updates her website daily to update her code and add great new features to it.
Both books are great priced and are a more reasonable alternative to Clinton Pierce's book. If you have a solid programming background, then you might get through this book in a breeze, but if you're a beginner, leave the copy on the bookshelf.
Rating:
Summary: Effective book, but be selective
Review: Sam's Teach Yourself Pearl in 24 hours covers Perl basics and CGI basics for the web. It discusses about SSI (server side includes) on the surface. Even even better still, it comes with a CDROM with the Perl interpreter which you can install on your PC/Mac. So you can immediately get up and running with writing Perl programs and trying the exercises. I got the book on Sunday evening. By Monday night, I had completed a Customer Review system for my webpage. It is similar to this page that you are currently reading. By Thursday night, I had completed a real time inventory check status. It's the one that says whether the item is in stock. I must say that this book has made me a very productive programmer. I had learnt and implemented so many stuffs in just 4 days compared to the weeks and months of web surfing and trying to figure out what people were saying on forums. Now I already know how to implement wishlists, gift certificates, logins, forums, etc. Before you get the assumption that it's so easy, let me explain my background. I'm a programmer by profession and a damm good one. With over 10 years programming experience, I have twice won awards for programming genius. My contribution was so good, it got translated to Spanish and published by several other magazines. I'm trying to impress upon you that I am reading this book from a very skilled programmer point of view. But I have no knowledge of Perl whatsoever. When I picked up this book, I expected Perl to be cakewalk, but I was a bit disappointed by the way the information was presented. It is sometimes too technical for a first timer and the author fails to clearly explain what a function does. It is sometimes lacking in illustrations and also contains a lot of questions designed to trick the student. Until now, despite reading certain chapters over and over, I still cannot understand what the author is teaching. If you understand programming fundamentals, then this could be a good book for you. It covers a wide range of topics. And you still can get by even if certain explanations are less clear. But if you a a newbie programmer, then I don't recommend this book because without some programming background, you may not understand at all what the book is saying. Imagine scalars, arrays, lists, hashes. There's no clear explanation what they are, but dives straight into how to declare and use them with complex examples. If you don't know what is an array or loop, then this book is not for you. If a seasoned programmer like me have trouble understanding certain parts, then a lot of other people will also not understand it. It's a good book, provided you can understand it. I wish the examples were simpler and better illustrated.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Starter Kit
Review: There was a time when all you needed to know was C and Cobol. However since I last played with either of these languages, countless more have been introduced, CGI, Java, Perl C++, J++ etc etc.. I have tried to learn them but hate manuals and rarely read them. I find most are badly written and I lose interest VERY quickly. However, up until now I have avoided needing to learn any new languages. That has changed recently and I have had no choice but to pick up a Perl book and learn it. So I was surprised when after an hour in B&N reading all the perl books that I came across this one. It actually 'talked' to me in a way I liked and more importantly, kept me interested. For a beginner, it is an excellant book and I would have no problems recommending it to anyone. It does come with it own CD which has the Perl language. Also all the code and examples are on the CD. If you are a beginner, don't buy the impressive looking 1200 page book, it will just gather dust.
Rating: 
Summary: Why this is the book for learning Perl
Review: There's nothing magical about programming a computer. Like anything magical, there's always a trick to it. For learning to program in Perl (or any other language) you'll need some analytical thinking skills, the desire to learn, some time and a guide. This book is that guide. The first 8 Hours will build your basic Perl skills: how to run Perl, how to use the documentation, the building blocks of the language, and some basic programming concepts like subroutines and loops. The next 8 Hours exercise the more advanced features of the language that you'll need to be a really effective programmer. The topics include structures, the debugger, using modules, database basics, and filesystem manipulation. A heavy emphasis is placed on where to find your own answers, for when you've exhausted the basics. Finally, the last 8 Hours teach you how to take Perl and use it for its most popular application -- the Web. You'll learn how the web really works, and how to use CGI it for your own web sites. All of the classic CGI programs are presented as well as some new ones, but most importantly they're presented as small programs that you can improve on. The book treats Unix, Windows and the Macintosh evenhandedly and without bias. A copy of Perl, the required modules, webservers, exercises, and examples for each platform is included on the CD-ROM. The theme in Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours is to present enough Perl so that you can write any kind of Perl programs you need and to then exercise that ability. Unneeded parts of Perl are not presented; you will not be buried in unnecessary details. At no point will you feel overwhelmed. This is not the work of a tech writer, it was written by a Perl coder and teacher. I write Perl code every day, and have for many years. This book is the accumulation of the experiecnes in using the language and answering the questions of others. It has been thoroughly reviewed by a dozen perl experts, and by those learning perl, for accuracy, clarity and completeness. I hope you enjoy it. Errata and additional material (including instruction materials) are available at http://www.geeksalad.org.
| 
