Pro Perl
This is a very comprehensive book for those who want to learn the Perl language from the ground up. The author does an excellent job of being detailed without being repetitive or writing at too basic a level. Intermediate users of Perl can find a lot here but even a novice will find sufficient explanation to allow them to learn the language from scratch. The book is well organized and starts with an introduction to Perl followed by how to acquire and install Perl. From there it goes right into the meat of the language with variables, operators, data types, interpolation, substitution, subroutines, regular expressions, working with files and directories, etc. Besides the language itself the author deals with some of the common administrative tasks like adding new modules and packages. The book ends with some advanced topics like embedding Perl and dealing with processes, signals and threads, and networking.
At 990 pages this is a massive book that is easy to follow and full of examples to show exactly how each concept should work. Pro Perl is highly recommended to everyone from the complete novice to advanced level Perl programmer and includes a lot of detail that I have spent hours on the Internet looking for before.
Author: Peter Wainwright
Publisher: Apress
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 219
Berkeley, CA 94710
Copyright: 2005
ISBN: 159059438X
Pages: 990 plus index