Learning Perl
by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, brian d foy · first published 1993
60% recommend40% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Clear, example-driven introduction to Perl that is easy, entertaining, and succinct. A common first Perl book and a good starting point for beginners, including those coming from other languages.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
<p>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 6th edition covers recent changes to the language up to version 5.14.</p><p>Perl is suitable for almost any task on almost any platform, from short fixes to complete web applications. <i>Learning Perl</i> teaches you the basics and shows you how to write programs up to 128 lines long—roughly the size of
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Mojolicious is a mind-blowing framework, doubly so with Mojolicious::Plugin::OpenAPI. Unlike Catalyst, there's very few dependencies. For a beginner, I'd recommend reading "Learning Perl" by Randal Schwartz first, then read a couple of the online Mojolicious tutorials/blogs. Also, beginners should note that there's 2 framework approaches, Mojolicious::Lite (a wrapper) and the full Mojolicious,…
on “Mojolicious 8.0 released: Perl real-time web framework” ↗Randal Schwartz's Learning Perl (O'Reilly) also deserves mention here. It was fantastic--exactly what an introductory book for a smart audience should be. It had examples; it was informative and very clear; and it was succinct. For…
on “Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective (2005)” ↗Learning Perl by Randal Schwartz[1] was the funniest programming book I ever read. I must give credit to this book if I enjoyed so much programming perl [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_Perl
on “Ask HN: Examples of good technical writing?” ↗…Ruby, _Why followed by the Pickaxe. For Emacs, I read Learning Emacs, a very good book. I even learned Perl from a book, although not the Camel book, which is torture to read -- I used Randal Schwartz's Learning Perl, which was very good. I learned CSS by reading Eric Meyer's O'Reilly book, pretty much cover to cover, as well as Dan Cederholm's book. I learned SQL (and Tcl as well) from Greenspun's books (e.g. SQL…
on “How do you learn?” ↗…about implementation techniques of OO protocols. Neat stuff. These books are great even today as they transcend the Perl language. A little outdated but still great to read are: Randal L. Schwartz "Learning Perl" Randal L. Schwartz "Intermediate Perl" Brian D Foy "Mastering Perl" (my personal favorite in this series) if you need to learn Perl 5 today. I personally also liked Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington:…
on “Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective (2005)” ↗Randal Schwartz's "Learning Perl" was one of the easiest and most entertaining introductions to any language I've ever read.
on “Learning Perl the Hard Way” ↗…the demo scene, nor of people like _why and the Processing guys. Somewhere along the way I found Perl, and the way from A to B was not paved with incantations. It took me a copy of Randal Schwartz's "Learning Perl" and a Christmas Holiday to get really hooked — the immediacy of thinking and doing and making mistakes and fixing them was paramount to my believing programming was not only for the initiated. While…
on “Ask HN: Non-technical people, how did you learn to code?” ↗After K&R, it was 'Using C on the Unix System' by Dave Curry (~200+ pages). I also enjoyed the first edition of Learning Perl by Randall Schwartz (~200+ pages). This book introduced me to regular expressions.
on “Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.” ↗The Camel book¹ is pretty fantastic. I hope the "Learning Perl 6" book by brian d. foy will be as good. -- ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Perl
on “Ask HN: What's the best textbook you've read?” ↗I find it useful to compare the reactions of O'Reilly and Intel. Schwartz worked for both (he wrote Learning Perl and co-authored Programming Perl for O'Reilly and made them plenty of money). He cracked the passwords of both companies without first getting permission. O'Reilly's sysadmin told him off for not getting…
on “Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise” ↗…index.html.pl is where the problem started and the reason why the officially recommended file extension for Perl files used to be (still is?) *.plx. I don't have the Camel book at hand, but Randal Schwartz's Learning Perl 5th edition says: "Perl doesn't require any special kind of filename or extension, and it's better not to use an extension at all. But some systems may require an extension like plx (meaning PerL eXecutable);…
on “YAML: The Norway Problem (2022)” ↗There is a similar joke in the book Learning Perl, 3rd Edition by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Phoenix. I wrote a post about it here fourteen years ago: https://susam.net/blog/from-perl-to-pi.html . Quoting from the book: "It's easier to type $pi than…
on “I wrote the least-C C program I could” ↗I'm with you on the books. I tried to learn Perl 5 from online resources, couldn't. Once I had books in hand, no problem. The good news for Perl 6 is that books are incoming. O'Reilly has taken on both Learning Perl 6 (by the formidable teacher brian d foy) for a summer 2017 release, and Think Perl 6 (a translation of Think Python by Laurent Rosenfeld and Allen B. Downey; unedited draft available now). Moritz Lenz…
on “Ask HN: Perl 6: Do you use it, how do you like it, what do you do with it?” ↗regarding 2., are you sure you're referring to the Camel book and not the Llama book? To me, Programming Perl (Wall, Camel) is closer in spirit to K&R than Learning Perl (Schwartz, Llama)
on “We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)” ↗…undergrad. Books/MOOCs we went through: * Pro Git (Chacon) [three times] * Programming Language Pragmatics (Scott) * Calculus first semester (Coursera/OSU/Fowler) * Eloquent JavaScript (Haverbeke) * Learning Perl (Schwartz/Foy) [two or three times] * Coding the Matrix (Coursera/Brown/Klein) [didn't finish] * Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach (Cox) * Learning Core Audio (Adamson/Avila) The…
on “Five Years of Running a Systems Reading Group at Microsoft” ↗