Re^2: What's missing in Perl books?

[ysth]

I've always thought the Camel (2nd edition; I've not owned the 3rd, though I had it out from the library and skimmed much of it) was a pretty good reference book. Can you give examples of things you wanted to look up but were unable to find? (Perhaps we are using "reference book" differently?)

[GrandFather]

I think at least part of the problem was that I was very new to Perl and probably didn't have enough nomenclature sorted out. Specific details are hard to remember - this was six months ago after all.

I recall looking for help with populating HoH and AoH type structures and getting very frustrated that there seemed to be examples that were one letter away (AoA ...) from what I wanted to do, but nothing that addressed what I was looking for. Often there didn't seem to be anything that pointed me in the right direction or I couldn't find it. It took a while for dereferencing syntax to sink in and looking that stuff up seemed to be somewhat of a chore.

These days I tend more to use the "Perl Pocket Reference" and perldoc, or the Chatterbox.

I did enjoy reading the Camel and learned a lot from it that way, but not as a reference.

[QM]

I think 50% of the quality of a tech book is in the index and the table of contents (in that order). If I can't find it in the index, it may as well not exist in the book -- I'm certainly not going to spend an hour proving the index is correct.

I've ranted elsewhere about specific things not being in the Camel index, which turns out were mentioned in the text. I'm not picking on that one, many are like that. In fact, like anything else, there are very few "great" indices.

After I had the basic syntax worked out, things like Effective Perl Programming took me further than any reference book. Though I've settled on the Camel book to look up functions. But I would have really liked a printed, indexed version of perldoc in the early days. Now, online access is much more prevalent, so it's not a hardship to go looking. But when I'm stuck in a DOS screen trying to read perldoc perlop...well, don't go there, I'm still annoyed with it.

[ww]

Grandfather's experience rings a real *BELL* for me, though perhaps for different reasons.

I came to perl of necessity as a journalist turned flack, who, because of very modest skills with html, was assigned to become a webmaster. Eventually, the html skills got to be fairly decent, but the customers wanted more ( was it not ever thus?). That eventually led to my foray into perl ...which has proven both wonderfully gratifying and intensely frustrating.

The frustration grows out of collisions with documentation and books that are couched in terms which are undoubtedly both precise and familiar to those who do have a broad CS background... but which I have not.

So ( at last, he gets to the point), my notion of a ("handy-")reference book is one that can sit beside my keyboard, in my bag, or even on the airline tray in front of me, and provide both answers on functionality and syntax.

This in NO way deprecates my other notion -- that the Cookbook, Perl - Little Black Book, and even MRE - are references; just not so "handy" unless I'm at my desk and free to take significant time from the immediate task at hand to review or learn the complexities of something not_yet_familiar.