Learning Perl: Making Easy Things Easy and Hard Things Possible

by Randal L. Schwartz, Brian D. Foy, Tom Phoenix

If you re just getting started with Perl, this is the book you want whether you re a programmer, system administrator, or web hacker. Nicknamed "the Llama" by two generations of users, this bestseller closely follows the popular introductory Perl course taught by the authors since 1991. This seventh edition covers recent changes to the language up to version 5.24.

Perl is suitable for almost any task on almost any platform, from short fixes to complete web applications. Learning Perl teaches you the basics and shows you how to write programs up to 128 lines long roughly the size of 90% of the Perl programs in use today. Each chapter includes exercises to help you practice what you ve just learned. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

Topics include:


Perl data and variable types
Subroutines
File operations
Regular expressions
String manipulation (including Unicode)
Lists and sorting
Process management
Smart matching
Use of third party modules
"

Genres: Programming, Reference, Technical, Computer Science, Nonfiction, Computers, Technology

394 pages, ebook

First published November 1, 1993

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's this old geek joke where you compare programming languages and cars (Assembler would be a Formula 1 racer, LISP would be an electric car, etc). Here's Perl:

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[James Swenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the way to start writing Perl: quick and painless.

Start on page one, where the authors mention that they "enjoyed writing it," with the following footnote:

Now, if you're wondering how we can say that we've enjoyed writing it (in the past tense) when we're still on the first page, that's easy: we started at the end, and worked our way backwards. It sounds like a strange way to do it, we know. But, honestly, once we finished writing the index, the rest was hardly any trouble at all.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is arguably the best one out there to start your Perl adventure, and I've learned a lot of small details about programming in Perl. Thank you, Randal L. Schwartz for writing this wonderful book. I'm going to start Intermediate Perl immediately.

[Nick Black · Rating 1 out of 5]

read this back at CNN in 1999. i've refused to read or write perl since then, and it's done me nothing but good.

[Scott Holstad · Rating 5 out of 5]

The all-time best book on Perl I've read...

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book moved to the Read shelf even though I haven't read it all the way through yet.

This is a solid introduction, but doesn't cover enough material to help me with my legacy software project. I found the Intermediate Perl book by Schwartz more useful. However, that book wouldn't have made any sense to me without reading this book first.

[Arthur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perl is so awesome, and powerful, even today.
All the concepts are correct and it is overall very well poised for the future as a language.
Also looking forward to reading Learning Perl 6

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good reference for me back in the 90s, but it's ancient in internet years. However, it's still worth mentioning that in the index at the back of the book on page 225 under the "S" section is this entry:

Scooby Doo, pronouncing "Windex" 166

Turning to page 166, you find the "rindex" function. :D

[Seth Dickerson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Teaches Perl in a nice and easy way, but Perl itself will bring tears when you get to RegEx.

[Armando · Rating 5 out of 5]

Para mí ha sido increíblemente bueno. Completamente recomendable.

[Isaac · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very shallow at times. The full book (the Perl guide) is funnier and more enlightening.

[Димитър Иванов · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book for starting your Perl journey.

[Sergio Ferreira · Rating 4 out of 5]

The llama 🦙 book. Where I learned Perl ♥️

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This had me on the edge of my seat from page 0 to page -1.

[Mo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wish I had read this sooner. Demystified much of the language in a clearer and more concise format than the on-line tutorials I had to use since the 90s.

[Joseph Leskey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is absolutely marvelous (and I just read the second edition; little did I know that there were newer ones). It was indeed (to the best of my knowledge) the instigator of my application of programming outside of Visual Studio, which, if you're well acquainted with these areas… well, never mind. Oh, in between Visual Studio and Perl, I learned some shell scripting and various markup languages, because I started using Linux (Debian and Slax specifically) instead of Windows (YAYYYYY!!!!!!). Well, when an aspiring programmer has the bountiful power of the Linux kernel at his command, along with a worthy tome, something is bound to happen. And thanks to this selfsame worthy tome, it did so excellently.

"Why is this a worthy tome?" you may ask. I shall supply you an answer. Firstly, It was published by O'Reilly, which, as the enlightened know, very often makes for an excellent book. Secondly, Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, linguist (quite interesting… a linguist creating a programming language), and employee of O'Reilly Media is co-author of this book, which is considered canonical for Perl developers. Definitely something to read if you want to program in Perl. Thirdly, information is presented in a kindly manner (typical of books published by O'Reilly) instead of the general chaos of some other programming references I've read. And any programmer knows how important order is. Fourthly, it has an index, which is a small fact comparatively and indeed most reference books have indices these days. (NOOO!!!! My web browser's dictionary does not recognize the word "indices." Where has it been for the last five hundred years?) However, indices are so imperative… so essential… so undeniably needed that I believe that I shall mention the fact. Fifthly, there are examples, quite terrific in their own right. Sixthly, it includes some stuff about using Perl as a Common Gateway Interface programming language. Seeing as I am predominately a web programmer, this is fantastic.

All that said, reading this book is a brilliant way to embark on the programming adventure. Therefore, I fully endorse the second edition of Learning Perl by Randal L. Schwartz as a reference to the Perl programming language. I hope sometime to read the later editions, because Perl is simply that wonderful. There are some that would argue, but I stick by this thought. I use JavaScript more, and I certainly find JavaScript most amusing, but Perl can operate on "any" operating system without the support of a web browser! It is also a wonderful CGI language, widely used for CGI purposes. And also… I've read that it inspired parts of JavaScript. So up with PERL!!!!!!!! (May it's majesty live forever (for my sake).) And now they're working on Perl 6!!!!

Also, as an official apology: Sorry for dedicating most of my review to irrelevant clauses and exclaiming wildly about Perl. I became a little excited, for I believe I may be writing some code using Perl soon and it's been a while since I have.

[Nadine Slavinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review was written by my son and husband who used this book extensively. They report:

I have programmed in Python and a little bit in C and I think this book is great - and so is perl. I already knew a little bit about perl from reading a Wikipedia article and looking at the perldoc documentation, but Learning Perl taught my some very useful things that I would have never found alone (splicing, nongreedy regexes, just to name a few).

perl has amazing support for I/O, and the book helped me understand regexes and file I/O. I found both perl and this book to be good for other things, too. I wrote a logging program that wrote logs with timestamps, for example. Other things I used this book and perl for included a calculator, a text-to-HTML conversion program, and a password cracker.

Learning Perl helped me uncover some bugs in my programs, taught me many new things, and was also just a fun read. The only thing I would add would be more about OOP (Object Oriented Programming).

I found the TOC (Table of Contents) to be very well done and the e-book version had links to the proper sections. I could find anything quite quickly with the excellent TOC.

[Kent Frazier · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first real programming book (not counting others that I bought but never got far enough it to really make a difference). I felt that it was a really good introduction to programming, as well as a fairly good introduction to Perl. It is certainly not the most comprehensive book on the subject, but the simple but effective description and the exercises at the end of each chapter did a lot to help me grasp programming principles and reinforce them. The book was short enough that I read it through once without really doing any programming, and then went through it a second time working everything, which meant that I was able to get a broad overview and then hammer out the specifics, which is the way I operate best. Nowadays, when I do program, I tend to prefer Python to Perl, but this book was simple and gently enough that it made me better able to understand my bigger, more comprehensive, but also more complex, Python book.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the quest to broaden my technical skills (or 'layoff insurance' as I like to call it), I've opted to learn programming. With IT Support rapidly becoming so automated and out-sourced, it seems to me that my current job will one day be replaced by a robot (in India, likely).

So one of my Unix admin co-workers has been extolling Perl, and I opted to pick up what appears to be the beginner's volume published by O'Reilly (my favorite tech publisher). I'm slowly working through it--it didn't take long before the jargon started becoming a dense thicket, but at least I'm still understanding the principles behind the process. The chapter assignments are helpful, although I'm concerned that with only three to four assignments per chapter I'm missing key concepts which will be called on in later chapters.

[Shreef A · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book can be good as an introduction to the basics of perl programming but it doesn't mention a lot of the OOP related features in perl. So if you're working on something more than a simple script, you will need to find some other place to read about references and other more advanced topics, which are not really advanced, but the book skips them as probably covering them would have made the book size increase to be around 500 pages.

While it's talking about the basics, it's still worth reading, as what can seem very clear to you in other programming languages, would probably be so hard to understand in perl.

About perl: As the book says, perl has a high learning curve, but once you understand all the tricks you will have high productivity, so don't expect this to be an easy ride.

[Russell Dyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perl is the first computer programming language I learned well -- the first language I was able to use for doing useful things. It was this book that helped me to learn it. I had tried other Perl books, but they just confused me. Schwarz understands Perl better than anyone and writes about it so well; he explains it in ways that keep it simple and comprehensible to newcomers.

Over the years I've thrown almost all of my computer books into recycling bins -- using e-book versions instead -- but this is one of five books that I still want in printed format -- to treasure, as silly as that may seem, and to always have at hand.

[michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recommend reading this book for entertainment and never writing a line of perl. The language is more backwards and silly than even VB (which is saying a helluva lot), but the three writers work through its vulgarities well enough to nearly convince the reader that it's actually worth learning. Don't be fooled by their wiles: perl is a mischievous mistress.

[Kevin Connery · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this when the first edition came out, but have been away from the language for a while, and picking it up piecemeal was getting old. It’s vastly improved over the earlier version(s), which were pretty good to begin with. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to learn about Perl. (Yes, there are a zillion of online tutorials, but this covers a lot more breadth.)

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is *the* Perl book. If you only read one, this should be it. The text explains concepts well, and the end-of-chapter exercises are designed to reinforce what you've just learned, integrating with anything you learned earlier, and also to stretch your imagination. You don't need any prior programming knowledge to find this a useful resource.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book for foundations, I would say... My review wouldn't be a particularly fair one because I didn't get too far with this. As quickly as my need to learn Perl arose, it diminished and disappeared. That said, should that need come back, I believe that this is book where I would re-start.

[Mohasin Zaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to learn Perl, then this book should be your starting point. The book has a humorous and example-based learning approach. You will see more footnotes than anyother book. The footnotes are worth reading with lot of insights on why things are the way they are.

[Kelly]

Totally learning old school PERL for some stuff at work. This text confirms many of the stereotypes that I have of PERL users. The foreword is a hilarious discussion of PERL wizardry which reminds me why I never learned PERL of my own volition. HAHAHA

[Amit Saurav · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellently written book. At first I thought this book was full of chit-chat with so many footnotes but by the end of it, it helped me really understand the basics of Perl. Totally recommend it for anyone who is thinking about "learning perl".

[carl theaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an add on text for a Perl class. Seems like I've
taken more than one version of this class, in person, online,
they're everywhere.
Contains various perls of wisdom you should need for this
language.

[Michael Economy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read 3/4 of this book straight though. It's a very well writting programming book. I've only used perl like 3 times in my whole life and have written maybe 2 lines ever though, so maybe this book scared me straight?