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March 2005
Book Review: Beginning Perl
Reviewed by Ed Schaefer
Beginning Perl
by James Lee with Simon Cozens and Peter Wainwright
Beginning Perl; 2nd Edition,
August, 2004
ISBN: 1-59059-391-X
429 pages
I've written articles containing Perl, but my co-authors always handle any
Perl programming chores. To rectify this shame, I
selected the second edition of Beginning Perl to aid my effort to
learn Perl.
Where's the Bullseye?
As you might expect, the target is "the novice and experienced
programmer alike" — readers with little or no programming experience,
and readers with some experience but no Perl background.
View the table of contents at the Apress Web site.
In the first two introductory chapters, the authors explain how to obtain
Perl, what the command prompt looks
like under "Windows, Unix, and other Operating Systems", and present other Perl resources.
The authors expect that the reader knows
how to edit a file, and they even explain how to set up simple
Windows and Unix directory structures for our work.
Throughout the text — especially in the early chapters — the focus is on the
novice. The authors flow chart simple if statements and while loops; present
a diagram explaining the differences between scalars, arrays, and
hashes (that's associate arrays to you old awk programmers); and illustrate
the array's push/pop functions using a stack-of-plates metaphor.
The Source Code
Like any good introduction, this text not only "tells" but also uses exercises
to "show".
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