Three worthwhile Perl books

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Mika Leuck on December 28, 2008 at 12:45pm

I learned Perl by reading "Learning Perl" by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Phoenix. ISBN 978-0596001322. I really like the O'Reilly Perl books.

Permalink Reply by Brian P Kim on December 28, 2008 at 8:44pm

Hi Mika,

If you still do Perl, I recommend taking a look through the 5th edition. I can't describe the difference, but the 5th edition reads better and explains better. It makes the 3rd edition look like "training". To me, there is a difference between "training" and "education". The 5th edition is more an education.

Permalink Reply by Mika Leuck on December 28, 2008 at 9:35pm

I haven't read the 5th edition. Thank you for the advice!

Permalink Reply by Paul Graydon on January 12, 2009 at 10:39pm

I've just received my own copy of Perl Cookbook. At my previous job we had a copy of this, Learning Perl and Programming Perl around. Between the three of them and the internet they were a pretty good source. Of them I've been missing the cookbook the most. I'm a script hacker rather than a programmer, I tend to favour towards using ideas and structures from other scripts and working them into my own scripts rather than writing an entire script from scratch; so the cookbook suits perfectly.

Permalink Reply by Toru Hisai on January 12, 2009 at 10:51pm

a) Programming Perl: There's More Than One Way To Do It
Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant
O'Reilly, 2000
ISBN 0596000278, 9780596000271
(I have a Japanese translation.)

b) Higher-order Perl: A Guide To Program Transformation
Mark Jason Dominus
Morgan Kaufmann Pub, 2005
ISBN 1558607013, 978-1558607019

From this book, you can learn both Perl language and higher-order programming!

Permalink Reply by Brian P Kim on January 13, 2009 at 9:09pm

Paul said:

[ snip ] Of them I've been missing the cookbook the most. I'm a script hacker rather than a programmer, I tend to favour towards using ideas and structures from other scripts and working them into my own scripts rather than writing an entire script from scratch; so the cookbook suits perfectly.

I know the feeling. I don't write apps. I just need tools.
I recently found File-Dircmp useful.
http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/dist/File-Dircmp
"The dircmp command examines dir1 and dir2 and generates various tabulated information about the contents of the directories. Listings of files that are unique to each directory are generated for all the options. If no option is entered, a list is output indicating whether the file names common to both directories have the same contents." ... from the ActiveState Perl 5.10 docs.
I have folders of backups. They get out-of-synch. File-Dircmp helps.

Permalink Reply by Brian P Kim on January 13, 2009 at 9:16pm

Toru Hisai said:

[ snip ]

b) Higher-order Perl: A Guide To Program Transformation
Mark Jason Dominus
Morgan Kaufmann Pub, 2005
ISBN 1558607013, 978-1558607019

From this book, you can learn both Perl language and higher-order programming!

Thanks. I don't think I'm ready for higher-order programming yet. Before that, I should spend more time with Acrobat 8, which I'm still using like Acrobat 6, and FrameMaker 8, which I'm still using like unstructured FrameMaker 7.

Permalink Reply by alf maglalang on March 16, 2009 at 8:07am

When I was teaching language data processing (linguistics) at UH back in the 90s, I was using Learning Perl. Having looked at the 5th edition, I know I could have done a better job. And I think I could have made it less painful if I had not insisted that they use Emacs. I love Emacs, but for non-technical linguists Perl+Emacs is an abortive combination.

If anyone is interested in crunching biological research data, I've used Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics.

Permalink Reply by Brian P Kim on March 16, 2009 at 9:04pm

Alf Maglalang said:

When I was teaching language data processing (linguistics) at UH back in the 90s, I was using Learning Perl. Having looked at the 5th edition, I know I could have done a better job. And I think I could have made it less painful if I had not insisted that they use Emacs. I love Emacs, but for non-technical linguists Perl+Emacs is an abortive combination.
If anyone is interested in crunching biological research data, I've used Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics.

How is Bioinformatics different? By the way, I'm glad you had a look at the 5th edition; I think some of the nuances and idioms are well presented. Makes Perl look less like a language to program and more an expression of a task. And presents some of those little elegances in a most ordinary way. Like a real language.

Permalink Reply by alf maglalang on March 18, 2009 at 2:46am

Hi Brian, bioinformatics is a growing field that intensively uses computational power for any biological research that involves a lot of data, basically almost all of biology (except for some case studies). I did some gene sequence finding for a friend many many years ago. The technique I used was close to the way I was using perl for language data. I was able to accomplish the genetic project with a series of regular expressions, automatic counting, and some interactivity.
Unfortunately, language data is a lot more intractable. A sequence of sounds is not simply a sequence of DNA. A sequence of spoken sounds have to be analyzed in several levels from phonology to words to word-formation to syntax. For my beginning course, I could only demonstrate some basic ways to analyze phonology and very little syntax, with a lot of pseudo-data so as not to intimidate the students. There are thousands of human languages -- each as complicated as another. and Perl was not readily suited to do complicated syntactic analyses, much less semantic analyses. I used other things for those.

Brian P Kim said:

Alf Maglalang said:

When I was teaching language data processing (linguistics) at UH back in the 90s, I was using Learning Perl. Having looked at the 5th edition, I know I could have done a better job. And I think I could have made it less painful if I had not insisted that they use Emacs. I love Emacs, but for non-technical linguists Perl+Emacs is an abortive combination.
If anyone is interested in crunching biological research data, I've used Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics.

How is Bioinformatics different? By the way, I'm glad you had a look at the 5th edition; I think some of the nuances and idioms are well presented. Makes Perl look less like a language to program and more an expression of a task. And presents some of those little elegances in a most ordinary way. Like a real language.

Permalink Reply by Brian P Kim on March 18, 2009 at 12:38pm

Thanks Alf Maglalang. For speech, I bet you also run into analog vs.digital complications.

For me, Perl works for everyday kind of things. My attitude is common - perl as duct tape. My tasks are small and varied, and I can't afford the time plus money for regular upgrades.

Take care,
Brian

Alf Maglalang said:

Hi Brian, bioinformatics is a growing field that intensively uses computational power for any biological research that involves a lot of data, basically almost all of biology (except for some case studies). I did some gene sequence finding for a friend many many years ago. The technique I used was close to the way I was using perl for language data. I was able to accomplish the genetic project with a series of regular expressions, automatic counting, and some interactivity.
Unfortunately, language data is a lot more intractable. A sequence of sounds is not simply a sequence of DNA. A sequence of spoken sounds have to be analyzed in several levels from phonology to words to word-formation to syntax. For my beginning course, I could only demonstrate some basic ways to analyze phonology and very little syntax, with a lot of pseudo-data so as not to intimidate the students. There are thousands of human languages -- each as complicated as another. and Perl was not readily suited to do complicated syntactic analyses, much less semantic analyses. I used other things for those.

Brian P Kim said:

Alf Maglalang said:

When I was teaching language data processing (linguistics) at UH back in the 90s, I was using Learning Perl. Having looked at the 5th edition, I know I could have done a better job. And I think I could have made it less painful if I had not insisted that they use Emacs. I love Emacs, but for non-technical linguists Perl+Emacs is an abortive combination.
If anyone is interested in crunching biological research data, I've used Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics.

How is Bioinformatics different? By the way, I'm glad you had a look at the 5th edition; I think some of the nuances and idioms are well presented. Makes Perl look less like a language to program and more an expression of a task. And presents some of those little elegances in a most ordinary way. Like a real language.

Permalink Reply by Baron Fujimoto on August 9, 2010 at 11:16am

Sorry, I'm late to this thread...

I second the recommendation for Perl Best Practices. Very helpful for creating maintainable code.

While not Perl-specific, I also highly recommend

The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
ISBN 0-201-61622-X