More perl tutorials

[clarjon1]

Hi all, this appears to be the right spot to post this.

I'm teaching myself Perl, after learning about the language thanks to the
Linux Gazette. I've been reading through the perldoc and perltut, and
have downloaded a few ebooks on the subject, and am working through them.

I was wondering what materials, either online or offline, you would
recommend for me to read? Something along the lines of what a self-
teaching high-school level student would find useful. Thanks!

 

[Uri Guttman]

c> Hi all, this appears to be the right spot to post this. I'm
c> teaching myself Perl, after learning about the language thanks to
c> the Linux Gazette. I've been reading through the perldoc and
c> perltut, and have downloaded a few ebooks on the subject, and am
c> working through them.

c> I was wondering what materials, either online or offline, you would
c> recommend for me to read? Something along the lines of what a
c> self- teaching high-school level student would find useful.
c> Thanks!

first off ignore almost every single perl tutorial on the web. there are
dozens and they just about all suck. they are full of errors,
mistatements, misunderstandings of the docs, and just awful writing. one
day when i rule the world, i will post reviews of them all and flog their
authors with python printouts.

there is a decent free book called beginning perl and you can find it on
beginners.perl.org.

i will guess that the ebooks you downloaded are bootlegs so you should
either pay for them or not use them. i have only seen bootlegs of
o'reilly books or bad books (not that there aren't good perl books that
aren't o'reilly but i haven't seen bootlegs of those).

you can buy ebooks cheaply enough of most of the quality perl
books. there are places which list many good perl books and you can ask
here for more recommendations.

uri

 

[Joost Diepenmaat]

Hi all, this appears to be the right spot to post this.

I'm teaching myself Perl, after learning about the language thanks to the
Linux Gazette. I've been reading through the perldoc and perltut, and
have downloaded a few ebooks on the subject, and am working through them.

I was wondering what materials, either online or offline, you would
recommend for me to read? Something along the lines of what a self-
teaching high-school level student would find useful. Thanks!

The O'Reilly "Learning Perl" and "Programming Perl" books are widely
regarded as good. Programming Perl may not have the right structure for
a beginner, and it's definitely more of a reference book, but it's very
readable and I actually preferred it to the Learning Perl book, but that
was when Learning Perl was in the first edition, and I'm told it's
improved a lot since then.

For both books, you should make sure you get the latest editions.

Note that none of the books AFAIK have info on perl 5.8 and higher. So
for reliable/up-to-date docs on ithreads, unicode (5.8ish) and the new
operators in 5.10, you're probably best off reading the man pages (but
as a beginner the only thing you may *need* is more info on the
unicode/utf8 system - depending on the kind of data/languages you're
dealing with).

From the man pages, you may want to check out:

perldata, perldsc, perlrequick, and maybe other things mentioned under
tutorials in the "perl" man page. And personally, I find perltoc very
useful when I want to find the right man page for some subject. As are
"perldoc -q something" and "perldoc -r something".

Joost.

 

[Joost Diepenmaat]

beginners.perl.org

That doesn't seem to work. I think this is the same book:

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

Joost.

 

[Uri Guttman]

JD> That doesn't seem to work. I think this is the same book:

my brain fart. i knew it was up on perl.org

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

that is the book. the OP should read that first.

uri

 

[Michele Dondi]

What really brought my attention to the interesting facets of
Perl programming were the perlgolf tournaments, that have sadly
(almost?) ceased activity. The goal in perlgolfing is to solve
a given problem in a given time frame with the least number of
keystrokes. A real golfing course also comes with a test suite
that makes sure that no side constraints get overlooked. There
have also been quite a number of minigolf challenges organized
by Terje Kristensen that make for an interesting read.

I personally believe that golf is cool, and I wholeheartedly disagree
with those that see in it a major risk for Perl. However I would also
shy away from recommending it as a *learning tool*.


Michele

 

[A. Sinan Unur]

That doesn't seem to work.

ITHM http://learn.perl.org/

Sinan

 

[Uri Guttman]

DF> _PBP_ and the techniques used in golf have few intersections.

oh, but those are amazing crossroads. ever see damian's selfgol program?
it plays the game of life and is a quine and a couple of other big
things in a single page of very dense code. not best practices but from
the same insane mind of damian conway.

uri

 

[Uri Guttman]

DF> No, but it was easy to find. And somewhat shorter than a page - it's
DF> less than 1000 characters (18 lines, most of which are much less than
DF> 80 bytes long). I find it amusing (and somewhat relevant to this
DF> thread) that the good Dr. Conway teaches a half-day seminar in "Perl
DF> WORST Practices" which is built around selfgol
DF> (http://damian.conway.org/Courses/WorstPractice.html).

i have seen that talk as he gave it to boston.pm during one of his
visits here. mind boggling is a kind way of describing it. in sept 2006
he gave 2 talks here and to protect our weak little minds we gave out
aluminum foil and had a hat making contest:

http://boston.pm.org/kwiki/index.cgi?Damian2006Mementos

uri