Perl: A Beginner's Guide

by R. Allen Wyke and Donald B. Thomas

Essential skills for first-time programmers! Perl: A Beginner's Guide will teach you the fundamentals of Perl programming. It covers Perl capabilities and syntax, accessing databases, working with... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0072129573
• ISBN13: 9780072129571
• Release Date: December 2000
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 474 Pages
• Weight: 1.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Better than some reviews give it credit for

I have the seond edition of Learning Perl and find that this book is not only far more accessible, but covers things that are useful for beginners that Learning Perl does not. The DBI for instance.At the price this title is going for used it is a bargain.

A gentle introduction to Perl

For Perl beginners, this book is significantly more readable than the O'Reilly texts -- I would like to have seen even more exercises throughout, though. Overall, a good springboard to a more in-depth text, such as the Wrox title "Beginning Perl". I deducted one point for a few minor (but annoying) typographical errors - this book needed one more pass by the technical editor. C programmers will quickly recognize the typos, but these could confuse some beginners.Also, this book covers the Perl DBI using the PostgreSQL database. Installing PostgreSQL is awkward on Windows, yet many beginning Perl developers probably use Windows. The Wrox book "Beginning Perl" makes the more logical choice of using the MySQL database, which is simpler to install and use on Windows (and also runs on most Linux/Unix platforms).

Excellent book for the beginners

This is the best book to learn basics of Perl programming. It makes really easy to learn everything you need to be able to write the simple programs or to have the good basis for the more advanced books.

Excellent Introduction to Perl

A lot of people write intoduction or beginning books for computer programming. But what most of these beginning books do is to very slowly introduce a few concepts then jump into advance topics without explaining how or why they got there. This book, although not perfect, is a quantum leap compared to other beginner books.The book starts off with a brief history of Perl and then slowly introduces the language of Perl a step at a time. Then it goes to the next logical step without skipping over important topics. The book does a good job of helping the reader write Perl programs for the three major systems NT, Unix and Mac and even gives some advice on how to work your server settings and how to access Perl with html.One of the areas the book could improve on is how you can apply the lesson you are learning about Perl for a problem. While the book does cover this a little bit, and anyone with some programming knowledge knows why or how, the authors could give a few real world reasons why you need such things as arrays in Perl.This book is highly recommended. Reading through this book will give you an excellent base in learning the Perl language.

good reading

I didn't know anything about Perl until I read this. Very informative, thanks Guys!!