[Perl] Report on "Programming Perl" (that includes an elaborated rant)

Fri Jan 17 19:10:22 EET 2003

On Fri, 17 Jan 2003, Eli Bendersky wrote:

> Your rant is interesting, and I fully agree about
> the quality of Programming Perl.
>
> A few comments:
>
> * There are quite a lot of online Perl
> resources - I first learned Perl from
> an online tutorial (CGI 101, I think),
> a few years ago, when I had to create
> a complex CGI system, quick. Sites
> like Perl Monks have extensive tutorials
> on almost any subject, etc... Finding
> Perl information online is not that hard.
>

There's Shlomi Yona and my own tutorials online as well. Several people
and I commented mine were quite good. Still, there was once a "Perl
Beginners" web-site and it got unmaintained and eventually got down. I
think I'll establish one on berlios or SourceForge and make an organized
effort.

> * O'Reilly may consider releasing the
> earlier versions of their books online
> (like the 1st versions).

The 1st version of Programming Perl covers perl version 4.00. It is pretty
much useless nowadays. The 2nd version would be something. But of course
it is up to O'Reilly. And Larry Wall, the father of Perl is now an
O'Reilly worker, and Tom Christiansen (another hot shot) also authored
many books for them.

So it smells quite bad.

> However, while
> it will benefit the community, I think
> it will hurt their sales.
>

I don't think so. You can easily find them online in various illegitimate
places. And Programming Perl has become something like a taboo. It's a
paper book that any company that respects itself needs to have on its
bookshelf. It's a book that programmer's sometimes like to read in bed
before going to sleep. Even if it hurts their sales a bit it would be
worth it, and they would still make a lot of money selling it.

> * There's Safari
>

I know of Safari. It requires payment, so it does not qualify as an online
book.

Whatever, don't whine unless you are going to implement it yourself. Maybe
I should add more lectures to my Perl for Perl Newbies ones. They are
already very verbose and contains a lot of examples, so they can be
considered a book.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> Eli
>
>
>
> --- Shlomi Fish <shlomif at vipe.stud.technion.ac.il>
> wrote:
> >
> > Programming Perl (a.k.a "The Camel Book")
> > Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen and Jon Orwant
> > 3rd Edition
> > Published by O'Reilly and Associates
> >
> > The Camel Book is O'Reilly's crown Jewel, and after
> > I read it I understood
> > that it was from a very good reason. The book is
> > very informative,
> > occasionally funny or whimsical, and covers every
> > last caveat of the perl
> > 5.6.x interpreter. It covers major issues in dealing
> > with Perl (both
> > simple use and advanced) and references to many CPAN
> > modules and extensions.
> > It covers Perl 5.6.x so it is very up-to-date.
> >
> > I liked the book so much that I think I'll have to
> > buy it, because I can't
> > remember everything it said there, and I might run
> > into a need of using them.
> > I skipped some sections (like the perlfunc
> > equivalent one), but as a general
> > rule read everything and most sections were very
> > good and enlightening.
> >
> > I would not recommend it for very beginners because
> > it often relies on
> > information that will be taught only later on.
> > People who are familiar with
> > similar languages like Common Lisp, Python, or
> > whatever, may find it useful
> > as well.
> >
> > But not all is well. It has nothing to do with
> > contents of the book itself
> > but rather with the unavailability of it and
> > "Learning Perl" (the "Llama Book")
> > online. I had to learn Perl the hard way by reading
> > its man pages one by one.
> > This was when I worked in a web-publishing company
> > that used Perl for CGI
> > scripts, and I had to learn it to do my job. The man
> > pages vary in quality but
> > many times explicitly assume that you know what they
> > are talking about. Maybe
> > they were primarily intended for experienced UNIX
> > hackers and sys-admins, but
> > an experienced Basic, Visual Basic for Applications
> > and C programmer in
> > DOS/Windows 3.11 like me, found many things there
> > unclear.
> >
> > I remember asking my supervisor what regular
> > expressions were all about and
> > he explained to me they were simply patterns that
> > were supposed to be searched
> > for somewhere inside strings. This was the
> > enlightenment I was looking and from
> > then on the "perlre" and "perlop" man pages made
> > sense, and I started using
> > matches and substitutes like crazy. Still, I found
> > the existence of too many
> > references to C shell, Bourne Shell, Awk, sed and
> > other UNIXish tools annoying.
> > When I worked for this company, I actually wrote my
> > shell scripts in Perl
> > because I did not know shell programming good
> > enough. (I later met other
> > people who started writing shell scripts only after
> > learning Perl).
> >
> > Today, one can even assume that Perl would be the
> > first language a person
> > learns. Imagine, a high school student who decides
> > to work as a programmer
> > in a LAMP environment and is given Perl into his
> > hands. He will be able to
> > learn Perl from the Internet alone (mainly from
> > sources that were written
> > not by the Perl core programmers), but it will be
> > much more difficult than
> > with PHP or with Python which have excellent
> > introductory documentation.
> >
> > The ironic thing is that most of the text of the
> > perl man pages were written
> > by Tom Christiansen who is a co-author of the Camel
> > Book (as well as the Perl
> > Cookbook and other books). While books have a place,
> > for people who want what
> > I call a "top-down" learning of the language, you
> > should still expect that a
> > "hacker" type would be able to learn things without
> > books. I learned Awk from
> > the gawk info manual, make from the GNU make info
> > page, and many other
> > programs from what I could find on the Net. Other
> > people would rather have
> > books and that OK. But a programmer of a program
> > must make sure bottom-up
> > learners and "hacker" types don't have to pay for
> > such to learn them.
> >
> > This is not the case for Perl. While greed is good,
> > I also think that making
> > the Camel Book and the Llama book (or similar books)
> > be available online
> > legitimately, will only cause O'Reilly to sell more
> > books, as Perl
> > becomes more accessible and people would like the
> > paperback edition for
> > reference, or for reading before sleep. Free the
> > documentation!
> >
> > Well, enough ranting - "Programming Perl" is a very
> > good book. If you can buy
> > the Perl CD Bookshelf which includes it and other
> > important titles for
> > your organization, do so, and if you like dead tree
> > (or hopefully
> > dead cannabis) books it will make an excellent read.
> >
> > -----------------
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > 	Shlomi Fish
> >
> >
> >
> >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Shlomi Fish        shlomif at vipe.technion.ac.il
> > Home Page:
> > http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
> >
> > He who re-invents the wheel, understands much better
> > how a wheel works.
> >
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> >
> > YAPC::Israel::2003
> > http://www.perl.org.il/YAPC/2003/
>
>
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        shlomif at vipe.technion.ac.il
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/

He who re-invents the wheel, understands much better how a wheel works.