Perl Core Language Little Black Book, Second Edition

Rating:
Summary: Handy Perl reference for language
Review: This is an excellent condensed reference of the Perl language. There is a little information on installation and the basics, but after that it's a well organized reference for all of the functions, keywords, special variables and other important features of Perl. There are no illustrations and the text is terse and concise.

I recommend this book to any reasonably experience Perl programmer as a handy desk reference. Though I would also look at O'Reilly's excellent Perl in a Nutshell book. This is not a book for someone who is unfamiliar with Perl. For the beginner I recommend Larry Wall's Programming Perl.

Rating:
Summary: So handy and terse! How rare in most computer books
Review: Truly a gift that this book is only 6"x9" and one inch thick. Clearly the author and publisher didn't see the need to fluff this book out. I've hated Perl for ten years and this book has made me a convert. I was able to hack out a token parser with hash table lookup and I didn't even understand those terms until I read this book. It's a complete reference and makes perl accessible to human beings and geeks alike. Though Coriolis is no more, this book is worth finding and keeping if you like to keep a tight stash of essential references on your shelf. (I'd bought it years ago figuring someday I'd have to use it, and it paid off.)

Rating:
Summary: Good for beginners
Review: [A review of the SECOND EDITION 2004]

A favourite scripting language of many programmers. Holzner offers an update to his successful first edition on Perl. Here, he talks about Perl 5.8. As a bonus, he offers informal glimpses of the upcoming Perl 6.

If you're not interested in Perl 6 for now, and already know the language, then this book is unnecessary. But if you are new to Perl, the book will be a concise guide. The examples are simple and short. Towards the end are subroutines of moderate complexity. All typically less than 100 lines.

One thing to note is that the book doesn't expound on higher levels of structured programming. If you have a problem that might require a Perl solution of say 1000 lines or more, then how to tackle this, and decompose the problem into more amenable parts is not discussed here. This book caters to teaching the syntax and simple applications that rest directly atop this syntax.