Re: Are these Perl Textbooks Good?

[stevieb]

I, too, much prefer reading on paper than I do online. I remember my earlier Perl years where I'd print out freely available Perl books on my work printer after hours, just to take them home to read them.

I like the O'Reilly books, as others have stated. A bit more advanced than what the OP has asked, I'd like to throw out Learning Perl Modules, References and Objects by merlyn (Randal Schwartz) and Tom Phoenix. This was instrumental in me finally grasping Perl references.

One of my very favourite books is one by Dominus (Mark-Jason Dominus) which he's gracefully offered for free, Higher-Order Perl (I have a printed copy from when it was available via PDF with tons of scratch notes in margins, plus a purchased edition). This book contains many things I still don't grasp.

So a couple of recommendations for the intermediate-advanced Perl programmer.

A pointer for the OP: If the book doesn't use & before subroutine calls, and has use strict; and use warnings in most of the code examples, you're probably good. Perl is Perl is Perl, and since even 5.6 (or 5.8), the overall techniques used today haven't changed very much.