Review of Perl for Dummies (Third Edition) (Paperback)

I am copying an excerpt from "The Perl Journal" review of this book.

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Summary: This is a really rotten book. Very few books are able to attain as many as eight major flaws:

1.'Dummy' approach encourages and reinforces the reader's disability

2.Lack of concrete programming examples

3.Lack of general discussion of how to program, apart from language-specific features

4.Reference manual organization style

5.Inclusion of too many useless and abstruse features

6.Complicated explanations where simple ones arepossible

7.Scaremongering and panic instead of calm explanation of affairs

8.Many, many technical errors, some very serious

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I taught myself Perl with little programming background (BASIC, 20 years ago). I started 1 1/2 years ago and am now using it daily as a web developer and data analyst.

Learning Perl from the books and resources out there is *extremely* difficult. There were many times I could've saved 3 weeks of hammering on a script if a perl guru had said, "Hey, list context just means the function wants a list, like an array or hash." I understand very well that the O'Reilly books are godawful for a beginner b/c that's where I started and suffered long from every explanation that said simply, "It's just like in C, so we won't explain it." That said, the books are pretty terrific once you're at a level to absorb them, but steer clear before then, unless you already know everything that POSIX means.

It might be tempting to pick up this book b/c there are pretty much no Perl books for those who haven't coded already. You should consider "The Elements of Perl" instead of this one. It's a better start for beginners and a wonderful way to start to understand Perl, its idioms, its culture, and how to program well. There is also "The Perl Black Book" which is a much better overview of the Perl than any single O'Reilly book, though the author isn't a guru, he's a good writer and tackles everything from the basics to advanced stuff with lots of examples and a CD with all the code.

Perl is wonderful, so please do pick up a book, just not this one.



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