Dr_Z2A said:
was going to buy "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall but don't have the
money for the book right now. free online tutorials and such <snip>
Can anyone recommend a good one to me?
Hi,
I'm rather new to Perl still, having used it recreationally about a year
now. I'd like to recommend in particular the free e-book version of Begining
Perl at:
http://www.perl.org/books/library.html
In addition to the very basics it has some more advanced topics such as
packages, references and an intro to object-oriented stuff. Learning Perl
does hint at those things from time to time but doesn't really have full
chapters on the topics. Learning Perl is better for Windows or Unix specific
examples in my view. I think it is also an easier read as the chapters are
short, pretty independent and the examples, though plenty, are mostly short
snippets. This does come down to taste but personally I tend to lose
interest fairly quickly if I have to go through large example programs in a
language that is not familiar to me, yet.
As for tutorials, I attempted to learn Perl with them initially but found
books much more complete and easier in the long run. Here are some tutorials
and articles I've found enlightening in one way or another. You might want
to check out some of these once you've got the basics.
For a quick rundown of the language, there's Perl in 20 pages at:
http://quong.best.vwh.net/perlin20/
For a simple example of the building blocks of object oriented programming
in Perl, provided that you know OOP in some other language, see:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/codecorn/littperl/perloop.htm
For Win32 specific questions and examples:
http://opensource.activestate.com/authors/jandubois/Perl/TPC3/fun.html
IBM seems to have a series of very useful articles on Perl, too. I learned
some list processing with functional programming-like constructs here:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-road4.html
You may want to read the rest of the articles by changing the number in the
very end. The site doesn't seem to be too accessible and I haven't so far
found an index of these Perl articles in the "link jungle". I'm sure there
must be one somewhere in there.
For an interesting take on what similarities Perl shares with natural
languages, Larry Wall has an essay on that:
http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html
Lastly, some perl distros such as Active State Perl at:
http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/
include a number of Perl tutorials on various topics like references and
I/O. There are the reference manuals which are useful as such but not very
informative for learning the language. The trouble is the same as with Unix
man pages, that is too many forward references and stuff that might make
sense years later, if at all. Put another way, it is hard to tell as a
newbie what is essential and what can be safely ignored for the time being.
