unix/linux guys - suggest a perl book/site?

[id10t]

I've had a few programming languages, but no Perl other than minor modifications to really simple scripts.

Got a good book to recommend or a good website with getting started tutorials?

Thanks!

[Tishabet]

Perlmonks.org was my go-to site back in the day, between that site and the "camel book" (O'Reilly) I got Perl under my belt pretty fast. Great language, BTW.

[VincentVega]

"camel book" (O'Reilly)

x2

[masraum]

I did a search a while back for this very thing. I took Fortran 77 in college, and remember basic from my C-64 days. I think those two experiences scarred me for life. I've not been able to force myself to program except for a little html which I wouldn't count as programming.

The results of my search revealed 2 books, the camel (although some folks recommend the llama before the camel) and Beginning Perl by Simon Cozens. I've got the Cozens book and did start reading it, but then my hours at work ramped up to 60/week and I stopped. That one is also online for free.

http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/

You may also want to check out the reviews for the camel book on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0596000278/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?_encoding=UTF8&coliid=&showViewpoints=1&colid=&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

[bonkers]

Not for virgins but if you already have coding experience, especially with other C-based languages, you could probably start with:

Perl Core Language Little Black Book
by Steven Holzner
published by Coriolis
ISBN: 1-57610-426-5

You can learn the what's and how's of Perl and have a handy reference book that only a guru would outgrow.

[spuggy]

Buy the Perl CD Bookshelf, 6 searchable books ("Perl in a Nutshell", "Learning Perl", "Programming Perl", "Perl Cookbook", "Learning Perl Objects, References and Modules" and "Mastering Regular Expressions" (PDF), with a bonus dead tree copy of "Perl in a Nutshell". Available cheap on Amazon, and very useful for searching for stuff. You can also load onto your laptop and take it with you.

The O'Reilly books are a great start, although Randal Schwartz's "Pearls Of Wisdom" series is classic, and the "Pro Perl Debugging" Apress book has the only good, in-depth treatment of the Perl Debugger I've ever seen. Sooner or later, "print" statements just ain't gonna cut it...

Oh, and once you've learnt a little Perl, surf CPAN for a week. No point spending 3 days writing some dodgy code when someone has been developing/maintaining industrial-strength modules that do exactly what you want for the last 3 years...

[Tishabet]

Originally Posted by spuggy

Oh, and once you've learnt a little Perl, surf CPAN for a week. No point spending 3 days writing some dodgy code when someone has been developing/maintaining industrial-strength modules that do exactly what you want for the last 3 years...

Although I have never used CPAN, I have found that in general Perl has an excellent community of programmers and library creators who are happy to share code... I specifically recall a free module which performed recursive descent and saved me untold amounts of time.

Perl also has what is IMHO one of the oddest/coolest subcultures of any language, centered around creating working programs that show a picture in the code. The classic is the so-called camel code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w                                      # camel code
use strict;

                                           $_='ev
                                       al("seek\040D
           ATA,0,                  0;");foreach(1..3)
       {;}my               @camel1hump;my$camel;
  my$Camel  ;while(             ){$_=sprintf("%-6
9s",$_);my@dromedary           1=split(//);if(defined($
_=)){@camel1hum        p=split(//);}while(@dromeda
 ry1){my$camel1hump=0      ;my$CAMEL=3;if(defined($_=shif
        t(@dromedary1    ))&&/\S/){$camel1hump+=1<<$CAMEL;}
       $CAMEL--;if(d   efined($_=shift(@dromedary1))&&/\S/){
      $camel1hump+=1  <<$CAMEL;}$CAMEL--;if(defined($_=shift(
     @camel1hump))&&/\S/){$camel1hump+=1<<$CAMEL;}$CAMEL--;if(
     defined($_=shift(@camel1hump))&&/\S/){$camel1hump+=1<<$CAME
     L;;}$camel.=(split(//,"\040..m`{/J\047\134}L^7FX"))[$camel1h
      ump];}$camel.="\n";}@camel1hump=split(/\n/,$camel);foreach(@
      camel1hump){chomp;$Camel=$_;y/LJF7\173\175`\047/\061\062\063\
      064\065\066\067\070/;y/12345678/JL7F\175\173\047`/;$_=reverse;
       print"$_\040$Camel\n";}foreach(@camel1hump){chomp;$Camel=$_;y
        /LJF7\173\175`\047/12345678/;y/12345678/JL7F\175\173\0 47`/;
         $_=reverse;print"\040$_$Camel\n";}';;s/\s*//g;;eval;   eval
           ("seek\040DATA,0,0;");undef$/;$_=;s/\s*//g;(   );;s
             ;^.*_;;;map{eval"print\"$_\"";}/.{4}/g; __DATA__   \124
               \1   50\145\040\165\163\145\040\157\1 46\040\1  41\0
                    40\143\141  \155\145\1 54\040\1   51\155\  141
                    \147\145\0  40\151\156 \040\141    \163\16 3\
                     157\143\   151\141\16  4\151\1     57\156
                     \040\167  \151\164\1   50\040\      120\1
                     45\162\   154\040\15    1\163\      040\14
                     1\040\1   64\162\1      41\144       \145\
                     155\14    1\162\       153\04        0\157
                      \146\     040\11     7\047\         122\1
                      45\15      1\154\1  54\171          \040
                      \046\         012\101\16            3\16
                      3\15           7\143\15             1\14
                      1\16            4\145\163           \054
                     \040            \111\156\14         3\056
                    \040\         125\163\145\14         4\040\
                    167\1        51\164\1  50\0         40\160\
                  145\162                              \155\151
                \163\163                                \151\1
              57\156\056

[spuggy]

Originally Posted by Tishabet

Perl also has what is IMHO one of the oddest/coolest subcultures of any language,

Heh. Seems to me you've not encountered the "International Obfuscated C Contest"?

Some folks just have waaaay too much time on their hands...

[jeffgrant]

Also, be aware that Perl has now been "objectified", so it has a bunch of things like abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism.

In short, it's not quite the simple "scripting" language it used to be.

If you're new to the concepts of objects and the above object "stuff", you should really find a couple of books to help with wrapping your head around objects. Rather different programming style than C or other linear languages.

3 books I recommend are:

Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design

Bruce Eckel's "Thinking In Java" (http://mindview.net/Books/TIJ4) (might be Java, but does a great job of teaching how to think in an object-based language, and most applies to Perl... also has a free on-line electronic version of the book).

Object Oriented Perl.


It seems to me that this is the biggest problem with most Perl apps that I've encountered... they fail to do "objects" the proper way in both design and implementation.

And good design patterns books go without saying.


$0.02

[EdT82SC]

While many of the books listed here may be good resources there is no better place to get started then with Programming Perl (aka the camel book).

[masraum]

So, id10t, are you a Perl god now? I've started reading again. I think that once I get this stuff figured out, I'll really like having the knowledge, but trying to learn this stuff, at least so far is on par with using a rusty spoon and a spork as a self vasectomy kit. I guess the basic on the C64 when I was a kid, and then Fortran 77 in college poisoned me against scripting/coding. I'm hoping that once I learn Perl, that it'll open my mind up a bit and I'll be able to learn some other stuff. I don't want to become a programmer, but some knowledge of this stuff could be very useful.

[mikester]

When I worked for Time Warner Cable a bunch of years ago me and a group of guys were the 'tools team' and we wrote in Perl and Shell scripts. It was awesome - my mind was ALWAYS programming. I would wake up having solved a problem in my sleep and write it down then go back to sleep. I'd wake up the next day and actually be able to read what I had written that night! It was crazy!

I'd get on the tread mill (I was quite a few pounds lighter too) and listen to some rage, get a good rhythm going and get into this 'state' where I would literally write the scripts in my head.

Now I can barely recall how to do a for loop...

[pmajka]

"Perl in 21 days", if its still in production.

Why, I gave it to a friend and now he makes 6 figures. thats 1 more figure than me.