Programming Perl (3rd Edition)

I bought this product-- specifically the third edition-- based on an Amazon review of the fourth edition which recommended buying an older edition of this book. I have now looked extensively through both the 3rd edition book and the 4th edition book.The 4th edition has more up-to-date information about deprecated features, unicode support changes, more backslash escapes, better coverage of recursion, and more details about using CPAN.I can find no reason to prefer the 3rd edition over the 4th edition. For context, this 3rd edition book was published in 2000, while the newest edition was published in 2012. Buy the newest edition you can. Skip this ancient manual and buy the newer, 4th edition.

If you are a programmer, with an extensive background in programming theory, and a passion for Perl, this book is for you. This book, written by the creator of Perl, contains more details about Perl than one could possibly find in any other book. This book doens't hold back in discussing perl topics, but rather it discusses them inside and out without excluding anything. For someone who has a thorough foundation in Perl, this is definitely the next step in exploring Perl.If you are a casual programmer though, I must caution you that this book is pretty intense reading. I found it helps to read this book while reading the "Perl Cookbook". The chapters for each book correlate to each other. This book explains how everything works, while the Cookbook shows you how to apply these concepts in real life situations.One complaint I had about this book were the unclear examples. Other books by O'Reilly such as "Learning Perl" and "Perl Cookbook" will label each line of code in their examples so that there is no ambiguity. However the example scripts in this book are sparsely labled, so it is not always clear what the author's intent is.However, if you feel up to the challenge, I would definitely recommend this book. After reading this book, your understanding of Perl will improve dramatically. In addition, the last few chapters will provide a very useful reference regarding Perl's many modules, functions and such. For serious programmers, you will thank yourself for buying this book.

Warning! This book is very informative! They weren't lying, I am in the Threads chapter of this book now, and though dates, it gives me the historical mindset of the late 90's with detailed information about every fundamental aspect of Perl -- this book goes deep... Watchout for the the Regular Expressions chapter though -- it seems like it goes forever, but in the end, it's rewarding to type out a Perl example with a RegEx and have a better understanding on what's going on... I'm going to read the more current versions of this book later --- it's worth the struggle...

Programming Perl, also known as "The Camel Book," is the ultimate reference guide, written by the creator of Perl, Larry Wall. As one might expect, this guide covers every nook and cranny of the Perl programming language. It's greatest strength is also it's greatest weakness: useful nuggets of information are buried everywhere throughout the text. This is a strength in that, when looking up a particular topic, you'll often stumble upon a useful morsel of information. It's a weakness in that you have to slog through often dry reading to find these hidden gems.It should be noted that this book assumes a working knowledge of Unix, in addition to some previous programming experience. If you are new to programming, or just new to Perl, you should check out  Learning Perl, Fourth Edition  instead. It is a much easier read, and ranks in my mind among the most well written technical books. Programming Perl makes for a great second book, as well as a desktop reference.

I read the first edition of this book.After reading some of the reviews here, I am reminded of when I first picked up this book and didn't have the background to fully appreciate it.After using Perl for several years doing Internet programming, and being exposed to all the languages it's possible to use, I still remain devoted to the work of this man, Larry Wall for what I believe to be the greatest contribution of all to humanity and to computer science.I stopped here to reaffirm that the third edition will cover Object Oriented programming. Although nobody mentions this, I'm sure he will, and another book I have said it would.Before brushing up on Object Oriented programming for Perl, I decided to re-read Learning Perl and Programming Perl (though I only had the first editions). Unlike the first times I attempted to read these two books, this time I was dumbfounded at how much info they (Larry and Randal) could cram into such a short place. One thing builds upon another. Everything written, the examples and all, took on new meaning. This was exciting reading because all the problems that it took me years to even identify were spelled out before me with examples I could immediately understand. There are many ways to do things in Perl, and my way, the obvious way, usually turns out to be the long way. Reading these books and adopting some new techniques they mention could literally save me years of time!It's a lot like learning music. Unless someone tells you why you have to learn scales, you won't enjoy doing it and unless you stick with it long enough, you'll never learn why you need to know them.I guess I'd have to say that sooner or later you will need these two books to be truly effective as a Perl programmer, but if you are a beginner, you won't know enough about Perl to realize why these are really great books. If you have several years of Perl experience, then these books will show you how to be incredibly effective, incredibly organized, and best of all, incredibly lazy!One thing that makes Perl so strong, is that anything that has ever been done with Unix can be done with Perl. If you're operating equipment with Microsoft software, you're missing half the fun.This book really shines if you already love Perl and worship those who spent enormous amounts of time making their priceless contributions.This is probably not a good book if you're new to Perl, in a hurry, and are trying to debug some broken code.I found "Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days" by Sams Publishing to be all I needed in my early days. I only wish I had the ability to appreciate the information in these other two books then.I am convinced that Perl is the highest level programming language there is and there is absolutely nothing that can't be done with it in less time and with less code than any other language.Now I'm going to buy a brand new Programming Perl 3rd edition and I think I'll even have it shipped overnight!

I was impressed it looked brand new. Seems to be well written by persons with a sense of humor as well as technical knowledge.

This is still serving as a very useful reference point for Perl to this day. We still have some Perl scripts still to be migrated and so this is helping me to understand them well.

Good

This is it. This is the book that got me going programming perl in less than a week.Just read the first chapter and you're already good in perl. Read the rest to become an expert. The writter really cares for making the book usefull and understandable (for my behalf, i got the feeling that the writer doesn't fill the pages "just for the money" like many others but really loves the things he's explaining).P.S.: Be sure to order the "Perl Cookbook", too, so you don't have to re-invent a solution for most of the beginners problems!

Es gibt in der Tat noch etwas Besseres: Dieses Buch findet man auch im Netz. Auf den Seiten zu den Funktionen schlage ich kniffelige Parameter nach. Dies geht schneller als das Buch aufzuschlagen.Später lernte ich, dass viele Kollegen Probleme im genauen, tiefen Verständnis der Mustererkennung haben. Auch hier stellt dieses Buch eine Goldgrube dar.

This text will not show you how to do things in a slick way. But it is the de facto reference standard for Perl. If you can't get your program to work, this text will help sort out the problem.