Beginning Perl
by Curtis Poe · first published 2012
55% recommend45% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A freely available introduction to Perl that teaches modern style and suits beginners and returning programmers. Often paired with Modern Perl as a starting point.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…and structure of a Perl application and tests, see the App:: space for standalone applications (e.g. App::cpanminus). If you're returning to Perl (or just starting out) you can do worse than check out Beginning Perl[1] and Modern Perl[2]. There are also Perl distributions such as DWIM Perl[3] which bundle Perl and the most commonly used modules. [0] http://niceperl.blogspot.co.il/search/label/cpan [1] http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781118013847/…
on “Why I Use Perl...and Will Continue to Do So” ↗…those days. Any resources I can go to to get myself up to speed with modern Perl practices? I'd recommend chromatic's Modern Perl (http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html) and Curtis Poe's Beginning Perl (http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/Beginning-Perl.produc...) as good places to start.
on “Why I still love Perl” ↗…CC licenced version (although it would be nice for you to pay some money to support the good work of the author and publisher ;-) http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html * Curtis Poe's "Beginning Perl" http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781118013847/ (Bias warning: Curtis is a mate - but it is a very good book on the topic. Honest ;-)
on “How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)” ↗…your distro is almost certainly sufficient for learning with (some of my large scale OO codebases are a bit pickier, but for scripting you're somewhat unlikely to notice the difference). Curtis Poe's Beginning Perl is a good all around introduction but I'm unsure if it's a good intro if you're aiming specifically for the text mangling side. For an uber-quick-start, I'd go with https://qntm.org/perl_en and then…
on “Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)” ↗…was in spite of there being a concensus and strong effort to push among the active Perl community that modern Perl was the way forward. Then two things happened: The books Modern Perl by chromatic and Beginning Perl by Ovid were written. I used these two books to teach newbies and their code is nothing like the code of newbies of old. If these two books reach enough penetration, they will change the identity of…
on “Perl - the Detroit of scripting languages” ↗You're incorrect in your realization. The truth is that the older books for learning perl are simply shitty. If you read Ovid's Beginning Perl, or chromatic's Modern Perl, you'll find they managed to explain the concepts very easily.
on “Why Perl Didn't Win” ↗For learning I would highly recommend the following books: Beginning Perl by Ovid. Modern Perl by chromatic. There are a lot of other good Perl books but some of them are getting old and it is better to already know a bit before reading so one can separate good from dated…
on “What is the best language/framework to write CLIs in 2018?” ↗I think the best book for learning Perl is 'Beginning Perl', 2nd Edition by James Lee, published by Apress. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159059391X
on “Ask YC: What is the best way to learn Perl?” ↗Let me point out http://perl-tutorial.org because most books you'll find by simply googling are terribly outdated and teach, plainly put, how to write shitty perl. Modern Perl and Ovid's Beginning Perl (not the older Beginning Perl) are excellent books to learn from. Also a note about the sigil: Get a decent syntax highlighting set up for your editor and you'll quickly realize how nice it is to have…
on “Perl is 26 Today” ↗> gurus It doesn't take a guru. Only anyone who actually cares about readability or learned from recent books like Ovid's Beginning Perl or chromatic's Modern Perl. The main problem Perl has is not anything to do with its language. It's all the old books from the 90s (that some diehard still recommend), but which teach outright shit when…
on “Perl Already Won” ↗Excellent advice to learn Perl! Be advised that some of the books mentioned are old and while still good books does not teach modern style Perl. Beginners should in my opinion start with Beginning Perl by Ovid and Modern Perl by chromatic (first book in the article).
on “Grasp Perl with Open-Source Books” ↗…like Archive::Tar and the various IO::* modules to start using pure Perl for what you need to do. http://perldoc.perl.org/index-modules-A.html Good books to read would be Modern Perl by chromatic or Beginning Perl by Ovid.
on “Show HN: Perl script that mounts a webdav share and backups your MySQL databases” ↗> Curtis Poe's Beginning Perl The online (draft) version of Beginning Perl is available at http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781118013847/
on “Why I still love Perl” ↗…to realize that I can't easily read or write to files on my machine with this language. Not what I was hoping for! Back to Barnes and Noble, another $40 and I came home with the O'Reilly camel book, Beginning Perl I think? Cover to cover read, probably the last time I did that with a programming manual. Decades have passed, I'm in the same camp as those that prefer Ruby now, but man what a breath of fresh air…
on “Not Your Grandfather’s Perl” ↗Worth saying: this is not another minor update of Wrox's Beginning Perl. There have been a number of revisions of Simon Cozens's Perl 5.6 (5.8?) era Beginning Perl, but this is a completely new book (other than the title). Cozen's original version is already available freely…
on “Beginning Perl (Wrox) - Read Perl book online for free” ↗