Re: [MacPerl] beginner needs book recommendation and advice

["Emmanuel. M. Decarie" <emm@cam.org>]

>>Or, are there any recommended tutorials on the net?  I looked at the
>>perl faq and macperl faq and the perl primer, but they all seem to
>>assume some kind of prior knowledge.  I do plan on looking into those
>>sights in more depth (but I'm short on time - I'm working full time,
>>taking 3 classes, job hunting, and now this!)

I don't think that you can learn Perl without putting a lot of time in it (not that Perl is hard to learn, but more because Perl have a lot to offer). But anyway, here are my suggestions.

For  a starter, you can try either one of those three fine books

+ "MacPerl Power and Ease"  from V. Brown & C. Nandor
--> Mac oriented, don't assume you have a programming/scripting background.
 I don't have it, but I read some bits and it look very good and heard good comments about it.

or 

+"Learning Perl" from  R. Schwartz & T. Christiansen.
--> Unix oriented, assume that you have a little bit of programming background. Its a very good book, very concise.

or

+"Perl, a Programmer Companion", sorry don't remember the author.
--> This one too is suppose to be very good and platform agnostic.

+Perl documentation.
--> Perl come with a lot of documentation. Check especially the FAQs under the help menu in MacPerl.  

+On-line doc and help

--> Follow this list and also comp.lang.perl.misc on Usenet. Don't post to clpm unless you understand the group culture (look at Abigail's posts for an extreme example).

--> Familiarize yourself with www.perl.com.


Then for reference you need

+"Programming Perl" from L. Wall,  R. Schwartz & T. Christiansen.
--> Very handy as a reference books on the built-in Perl functions and modules (and a lot of other things). This a THE reference book.

and

+"Perl in a Nutshell" from E. Siever, S. Spainhour, N. Patwardhan.
--> Very good book. Cover everything Perl (more than the above), and the info is easy to access. This is the first book I look when I want to find something.

To have a lot of examples of Perl scripts:

+"Perl Cookbook", from  T. Christiansen and N. Torkington.
--> You absolutely need this book. This is the second book I look at when I need to understand something.

After you start grocking Perl, you need:

+"Effective Perl Programming", from J. N. Hall
--> A very nice book, well written and concise. Can help you to understand better some of Perl's concept that you didn't understand well in the others books.

and

+"Advanced Perl Programming", from S. Srinivasan.
--> Same with this book, the chapters on Object Oriented in Perl and on data persistence are very good.

Don't be discouraged with the length of the doc. Perl is very very big, but its also a nice language, and you can easily start scripting with Perl before you master all of its aspects. I'm just a Perl beginner, and at first, I had trouble understanding some of the idiom of Perl, but now I see Perl as a fun and elegant programming/scripting language (especially when you are obliged to learn Ada :(, anyone out there like Ada and can explain why?).

Cheers

-Emmanuel
 

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Emmanuel M. Dˇcarie - <emm@cam.org>
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