Your opinion about a book

[Stefany]

Hello colleagues.

I seek your wisdom. My Bday is coming up - and I was thinking of getting this book as a present - This book

because you can get it for 1 cent second-hand and it is 1k pages. However, the book was published 2000 !!! Do you think I will have any benefit from it since it has been published 14 years ago, OR I will have benefit from it since all I would need to do is look up the newest functions? Thanks a bunch!

[tobyink]

That's a really old edition of Programming Perl. I'd recommend getting something more up to date than that; a lot can change in 14 years. There have been several updated editions of this book printed since; the most recent was in 2012.

If you can tolerate reading online rather than dead trees, then there are a couple of very good Perl books you can read for free! (You can also pay for the dead tree editions, but I don't think you'll find them for $0.01.)

• Modern Perl by chromatic
• Higher Order Perl by Dominus

A pre-edited version of Ovid's Beginning Perl was also available on the O'Reilly website. It's gone now, but still available via archive.org.

[AppleFritter]

Programming Perl is a wonderful book and an invaluable reference, one of the best you can get if you're a Perl programmer; I consider it a must-have. The third edition's fairly old, though: it covers Perl up to version 5.6, and although the core language is fairly stable, there have of course been many changes and updates since then, so I'd really recommend getting the current (fourth) edition of the book instead. You may not be able to get it for one cent, but believe me, it'll be money well-spent.

[erix]

This is one of the most readable programming books that I know of (and it's funny but that's less important).

The newer edition (4th ed., 2012) is 120 pages longer, and probably updated throughout. Probably worth its money (but I admit: I don't have the newer book).

I have the older edition (3rd ed., 2000) here before me and looking through it it seems to me to be very useful already.

BTW, I do hope you'll get a few more expensive presents as well :)

[McA]

BTW, I do hope you'll get a few more expensive presents as well :)

A present needs not to be expensive to be very valueable. ;)

But back to the initial question: I had vibrations from my computer's fans which resulted in a very nerving noise while I was programming in Perl reducing my productivity extremely. And after I put this book (2nd edition) onto the computer case I got silence back. Therefore the book was worth every cent. ;)

Regards
McA

[CountZero]

I have this book (and also some more modern editions) and although it describes the state of Perl art around the turn of the century, it is still very valuable. Of course it won't discuss the "Modern Perl" we now all use (don't we?) but the basics haven't changed that much. Provided you know its limitations and you keep yourself updated on the newer Perl functions, I would not hesitate for a second to order this book.

And besides, anyone having this book on his shelf can claim to be "an old Perl hacker". (BTW: I still have the "pink Camel" book which describes Perl 4!)

[Voronich]

If you can really get 3rd edition for $0.01 then jump on it. It's really still my go to perl book. But a more recent edition really would be nice to have.