BOOK REVIEW
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Title: Learning Perl, 4th Edition
Authors: Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
ISBN: 0-596-10105-8
Year: 2005
# pages: 283
This is the fourth edition of one of the most popular books for learning
Perl. The authors do a good job of topic selection to ensure that most
users will get up and running with Perl pretty soon.
Many introductory programming language books fall into the trap of wanting
to cover a lot of material, and in the process becoming not much more than
glorified documentation manuals. This book, though, continues to be an
exemplar in how to write a good first book on a programming language. The
authors cover a selection of topics, and keep the exposition terse,
interesting, and logical.
Topics covered are: scalars, lists, arrays, subroutines, input/output,
hashes, regular expressions, text processing, control structures, files,
directories, strings, sorting, process management, modules, and some selected
Perl techniques.
A few suggestions for improvement in the next edition:
(1) In my copy, some of the exercise answers were out-of-sync with the
exercises themselves. They probably forgot to sync exercise answers with a
previous book edition.
(2) It seems to me that it is important in Perl to use standard language
idioms. Therefore, it would be good to have separately typeset sections
where language idioms are illustrated. The authors already use idiomatic
Perl, so this work would just involve highlighting the first uses of such
phrases somehow.
(3) It wouldn't hurt to crank up the complexity of some of the exercises,
and introduce a few more Perl tricks in the process in the answers.
(4) My personal preference would be for realistic scenarios as running
examples, but I realize that the book might be less interesting that way.
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(c) Arun Marathe 2006
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