Beginning Perl by Ovid Curtis Poe

[pritesh]

Item Description: This is an ideal Perl book both for those needing to maintain existing Perl systems or wish to make a change in their career.

Review Synopsis: Awesome Perl Book. Should have been named as “The Definitive Perl Guide” because it truly is so.

This book should have been named as “The Definitive Perl Guide”. Because it truly is so. A few highlights of the book are as follows:

In the Introduction section itself, the author makes it absolutely clear that “This book is about money”, meaning it focuses on getting the reader “production ready”. Which is why, it focuses on Perl Version 5.8 and 5.10. as these are the Perl Versions running on most of the production servers. Perl is backwards compatible and the code in the book also runs on all the latest versions of Perl. I’m on Strawberry Perl Version 5.20.2 and whatever code examples I’ve tried work as is.

The way this book explains “Context” of Perl is simply amazing and amazingly simple.

Same goes for the way the author explains how to write chained ternary operators, references, regular expressions and many other concepts. I could never wrap my head around the regular expressions, but this book made it crystal clear. I had to read through the Perl docs to refer to some specific requirements, and I had read the doc earlier, but this time, it all made sense.

I’m not a programmer by profession. I’m a storage administrator on lookout for writing some scripts to automate certain critical monitoring stuff, and this book was immensely helpful in that. By the time I finish reading this book and trying out the code given in there, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to write even better scripts. The book is also sprinkled with the best practices and author has taken care to explain why.

I had read the book on OFPS, the Open Feedback Publishing System of the publication where they basically put the book online for a few weeks, and was looking forward to buy it. I couldn’t buy it immediately as job and other responsibilities took a lot of time, but bought the book now that I can devote some small chunk of time every day to learning Perl.

The author is indeed a Perl Guru and his writing style makes it pretty obvious. It’s not an easy task to cover so much of Perl in one single book.

If you need just one single book that will get you “production ready” with Perl, indeed, this is the one to go for. I hope there was a PDF version of this book, that’s my only gripe.

Thanks Ovid for writing such a fabulous book.

[Ovid]

I just stumbled across this review. Thank you very much, pritesh. I'm humbled that you think so highly of it. I also have to thank the many wonderful reviewers who helped me when I was writing. Plus, the editorial staff at Wiley were awesome. It too me eight months to write what is probably the longest book on Perl written by a single author, and it has typos (new wife, new baby, new country, new job, and writing a book at the same time aren't a great combination), but I'm proud of that book.

[pritesh]

Hi Ovid,

Happy new year. You ought to be proud of the book. It's awesome. I had written a review on amazon after reading your article explaining how fake reviews were affecting the amazon ranking of your book and then just re posted the same here. By the way, your book is my first amazon purchase!! I've bought a lot of stuff off amazon after that, but your book was the first. Thanks for writing such an awesome book. Hope you come up with an updated version soon. I'll be the first one to buy it from India :)