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| Author: Clinton Pierce
Publisher: Sams
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy Used: $0.52
You Save: $29.47 (98%)
New (9) Used (25) from $0.52
Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 857695
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 7.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0672322765
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
UPC: 752063322765
EAN: 9780672322761
Publication Date: October 5, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: CD NOT INCLUDED 2nd Edition. GOOD with average wear to cover, pages and binding. We ship quickly and work hard to earn your confidence. Orders are generally shipped no later than next business day. We offer a no hassle guarantee on all our items.
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| Customer Reviews:
How to get your hands dirty quick October 5, 2004
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
As with the other titles in the Sam's Teach Yourself xxx in 24 Hours series, this book aims at quickly arming you with enough knowledge of Perl to start programming in the language in no time. If you are a complete newbie to programming, this book is not for you, because it takes a "focus on the trees, ignore the forest" approach. In other words, you are thrown into coding right away. There's no high-level discussion of data structures and programming gotchas, etc. There's a lot of stuff crammed into each lesson, and some of the lessons will likely take more than an hour (and more than one pass) to understand. While this is not a reference at all, and many subtle details are omitted (which is actually a bad thing in the long run because Perl is such a complicated language), the book does get you started quickly. A lot of practical examples are given to show you how the language works, and many of the snippets included can be used in your actual programming endeavors. For example, you can take the code to find unique elements in a list as is and use it without any modification (save for using your own variable names).
If you already have some programming background and need just one book to learn Perl quickly, this is the book for you. After this, I'd recommend the "camel book", i.e., "Programming Perl" published by O'Reilly, which gives a forest-over-trees treatment to the language, plus it contains a useful reference on the language.
 To be honest...not that great. July 27, 2004
Reading this book is kind of like riding a bicycle for the first time. First, you sit on the bike and place your feet on the pedals - in the beginning of the book, you slowly learn about variables, arrays and how Perl programs are constructed. So far, everything's doing great. You're understanding everything that is being said to you, then all of a sudden you get pushed down a huge hill going at a very fast speed. Before you know it, you crashed. That's how it is reading Clinton's book. The beginning is great - great introduction and you start to feel your confidence grow as you tell yourself, 'I can do this!' After Chapter 5, everything goes chaotic. Clinton slams difficult tasks in your face without providing any answers or solutions to his exercises. After every chapter, there is a quiz that gives you around 3 questions and answers about the chapter you just read. The book then provides you with very difficult exercises that have no solutions provided for you. I felt very lost and disorganized on some chapters that describe regular expressions and filehandles. The author has two different chapters on files - one for filehandles and one for opening, reading, and writing files. That was one of the most common sense things Clinton should've done: Kept all the file(s) information in ONE chapter instead of spreading it out between 2 chapters that are half length of the book away from each other. Another problem that kept arousing were his code examples. A lot of his code included extra garble that was not necessary for successful completion of the program. Also, a lot of his examples did not work properly. On one of the other chapters that discussed databases, Clinton wrote an database look-up program that you could look up people by their e-mail address or phone number. The problem with that was you couldn't add any people to the database using his code and I had to modify it extensively to get it to work. I had to get help from other sources throughout that chapter and throughout his book to accomplish the tasks.
I will tell you that I did learn the fundamentals of Perl using this book, but there were many, many times that I wanted to throw it against the wall. I highly recommend two books instead of Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours. For people who want to learn Perl and learn it well, check out Randal L. Schwartz & Tom Phoenix's 'Learning Perl 3rd Edition' by O'Reilly publishing. That book creates an amazing foundation to master Perl AND provides answers to all the exercises. People who would like to learn the basics of Perl with extensive CGI programming, check out Jacqueline D. Hamilton's 'CGI Programming 101: Perl for the World Wide Web.' Jackie's book is an amazing piece of literature that provides you with great coding examples that work and are understanding. She even updates her website daily to update her code and add great new features to it.
Both books are great priced and are a more reasonable alternative to Clinton Pierce's book. If you have a solid programming background, then you might get through this book in a breeze, but if you're a beginner, leave the copy on the bookshelf.
Effective book, but be selective May 7, 2004
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
Sam's Teach Yourself Pearl in 24 hours covers Perl basics and CGI basics for the web. It discusses about SSI (server side includes) on the surface. Even even better still, it comes with a CDROM with the Perl interpreter which you can install on your PC/Mac. So you can immediately get up and running with writing Perl programs and trying the exercises.I got the book on Sunday evening. By Monday night, I had completed a Customer Review system for my webpage. It is similar to this page that you are currently reading. By Thursday night, I had completed a real time inventory check status. It's the one that says whether the item is in stock. I must say that this book has made me a very productive programmer. I had learnt and implemented so many stuffs in just 4 days compared to the weeks and months of web surfing and trying to figure out what people were saying on forums. Now I already know how to implement wishlists, gift certificates, logins, forums, etc. Before you get the assumption that it's so easy, let me explain my background. I'm a programmer by profession and a damm good one. With over 10 years programming experience, I have twice won awards for programming genius. My contribution was so good, it got translated to Spanish and published by several other magazines. I'm trying to impress upon you that I am reading this book from a very skilled programmer point of view. But I have no knowledge of Perl whatsoever. When I picked up this book, I expected Perl to be cakewalk, but I was a bit disappointed by the way the information was presented. It is sometimes too technical for a first timer and the author fails to clearly explain what a function does. It is sometimes lacking in illustrations and also contains a lot of questions designed to trick the student. Until now, despite reading certain chapters over and over, I still cannot understand what the author is teaching. If you understand programming fundamentals, then this could be a good book for you. It covers a wide range of topics. And you still can get by even if certain explanations are less clear. But if you a a newbie programmer, then I don't recommend this book because without some programming background, you may not understand at all what the book is saying. Imagine scalars, arrays, lists, hashes. There's no clear explanation what they are, but dives straight into how to declare and use them with complex examples. If you don't know what is an array or loop, then this book is not for you. If a seasoned programmer like me have trouble understanding certain parts, then a lot of other people will also not understand it. It's a good book, provided you can understand it. I wish the examples were simpler and better illustrated.
 Unhelpful February 13, 2004
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
As a Perl neophyte, the book was totally unhelpful. It did not describe clearly the most basic functions a new user would want to know like reading a file, parsing it, matching patterns, etc. Look elsewhere.
 Simply the Best November 14, 2003
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
It introduces Perl in an easy and effective way, with exercises and quizzes at the end of every chapter. It's not just a reference book, it's a book to learn by. It touches on Database programming in Perl and CGI programming. There isn't a better choice for a beginning Perl programmer.
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