Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning Perl:

I have found the forewords in all my O'Reilly books very worthwhile including this one. The first chapter ( A Stroll Through Perl) is enough to get you doing some serious and useful work. If you have any programming experience this chapter alone could be all you need.

I use the rest of the book as a reference and an invaluable one. "Learning Perl" sounds like it's meant for beginners, but this book is meaty enough to carry you much farther.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning Perl:

I am now a little bit embarrassed to speak in favour of the book. As an amateur developer describing true masters of programming, I think the exercises are not so bad. In fact, they are quite inspiring.

Iam now halfway through the book at around chapter 7. If you really take it serious, you can always find that what you're already taught should have enabled you to complete the exercise. (Though the material may not in exactly the same chapter, definitely it must have been covered.)

Perl is difficult. I do not deny that. It is because it has an underlying philosophy "There any many ways to do the same thing. I like my way, yet I don't claim mine to be THE best way." Thus it cannot be treated in the same way as some simple and structured language, like Pascal. Yet the book step by step dissects the language in an elegant way. If you have a programming background in any language, you should have no difficultly to follow through.

As long as the code is easy to read and it is straight to the point, I don't mind someone putting short statements together with multiple colons. Come'on, guys, we are not doing Cobol on 80-column punched cards.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Learning Perl:

Greetings,

I am just finishing up with Learning Perl and am very dissapointed. I expected this book to be aimed for beginners, and to be well written. You can't expect someone new to fill in the blanks themselves, but Mr. Schwartz does.

The most exciting part about having a "Learning" book is that it comes with Exersises at the end of the chapters. These exersises are lame, to be blunt. They aren't explained well enough, and the chapters preceding them don't give you all the knowledge to complete them.

The worst part is the answers at the end of the chapters where Mr. Schwartz has the ability to make you feel like you've learned nothing. He'll write the code (That you must match your code to) using techniques that he never teaches, and using bad techniques as well (command; command; command; [Look, one line of code!). On one he even says, "Yes, this one needs some explaining." But never explains! It needed explaining because there were way too many things there not mentioned in the chapter/book.

There are frequent code-flaws in his examples throughout the pages.

Be warned. If you must learn Perl, then you'll need to buy more than just this book. If you know nothing about programming, or shell scripting, then I'm afraid that this book could become too difficult.

-JD