Learning Perl

[Michelle Barton]

Does anyone have some good book recommendations for Perl?

Thanks,
Michelle

[Pete Randall]

Michelle,

Merijn has some recommendations under the Perl section of his page:

http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/#Perl


Pete

[Alan Meyer_4]

The Camel book

Programming Perl by O'Reilly has been most valuable to me. It's written by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Jon Orwant

[Gavin Clarke]

I got Picking Up Perl as my starting point and I found a link to in on these forums (I think).

I'm sorry to say I can't find the post now.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

In a sense, you've answered your own question. O'reilly's "Learning Perl" is an excellent starting point. I would then go on to their "Programming Perl", "Perl Cookbook", and "Advanced Perl Programmimg" --- probably in that order. Another O'reilly book I find useful is "Mastering Algorithms with Perl."

Whatever sources you choose, first and foremost, MASTER regular expressions and then MASTER Perl's extended regular expressions. Your Perl will be extremely limited until you do this.

[Mel Burslan]

Well, I found myself buying books and not touching them not only on PERL but on myriad of other things as well. My take of learning anything is to find a pet project to yourself and go at it with the help of whatever documents you can find on the subject.

I once found these two online resources quite helpful as the starting points:

http://learn.perl.org/library/beginning_perl

and

http://www.ebb.org/PickingUpPerl/pickingUpPerl_toc.html

If you insist on written word, I'd have to go with the ca,el book suggestion as a desktop PERL reference, published by O'Reilly books (ISBN 1-56592-149-6)