perl

I had literally zero programming experience in Perl, and only a little experience in another language when I bought this book. Fortunatley this book assumes that you know very little (if anything)about Perl (or programming for that matter). In my opinion, the ONLY way to learn a programming language is to start from the beginning and work your way to more advanced topics, and thats exactly what Perl for Dummies does. Even if you already know some Perl, the examples and quick references in this book are invaluable...a MUST on every Perl learners and programmers book-shelf.

Having been almost completely stumped by trying to learn Perl using the camel, I was desperate to find something that would make it a bit easier to get started. This book was just what the doctor ordered. True, there were no excercises, but I could dream up my own without much difficulty. I would have given this book the full five stars as a starter for Perl (at least for someone like me who has programming experience; non-Perl, non-C, but still) if it hadn't been for one thing: Doesn't anyone proofread these things? It's bad enough when there are irritating t7pos in the text describing things, but when the little sample code snippets have errors in them, that's really bad.

That said, the book made me realize at the first glance when the code was bad, so it definitely taught me something. And now I feel ready to go back to the camel again.

This book seems to follow the pattern of most Dummies books I've read...give a good overview of the major considerations of the topic at hand, provide a few examples to help give the reader a feeling of empowerment, and indicate that there is much more to learn.

I came to this book needing to learn perl well enough to write some simple text modification programs for work. While this book does not replace a semester-long university course on the language (which is what I'm used to), it does give the reader enough information to jump in and start writing some simple perl programs...if your comfortable with the OS you're dealing with and if perl is already installed (I'm not sure I really could have accomplished those tasks with only the knowlege from this book).

I guess my take on this book and other Dummies books are like those infamous Cliff Notes from high school...simply reading these books won't make you an expert, but they can give valuable insight and pointers that you might not easily gain on your own. As an additional tool coupled with a little bit of programming experience and the provided perl documentation, Perl for Dummies has helped me get up to speed quickly and complete several important projects...which I don't think I would have been able to do otherwise.