[plug] PERL book

[Christian]

On Wed, 15 Dec 1999, Daniel Pearson wrote:

> How advanced does it make you, if you know what I mean? Does it teach you
> how to make any scripts? ie. A simple mail one. If anyone here has a copy of
> it, I'd like to borrow it for a while to see what it's like

Advanced enough that you can easily do in Perl what most half-decent C
programmers can do in C with intense pain. :-)

I've known some pretty good Perl programmers who learnt their craft
reading Learning Perl and manual pages.  Programming Perl duplicates to a
large extent the contents of the manual pages, so, in some ways it is
questionable whether some-time Perl programmers really need it.

Reading Learning Perl will make you feel like an expert in the language,
picking up Programming Perl will bring you down to earth and make you
realise how much you don't know.  Having said that, someone with a good
Unix programming background could probably walk straight into Programming
Perl and not need Learning Perl... but LP is still the easiest, quickest
route to writing useful scripts.

As for the extent of what Learning Perl teaches you, my opinion is that
after reading it you can probably do 90% of the things you'll want to do
in Perl and have some idea where to find out the other 10%.

Regards,

Christian.

============================================================================
"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
                					-- Henry Spencer