Date: Thu, 17 Mar 1994 12:07:38 -0600 (MDT) From: "Rob Slade, Ed. DECrypt & ComNet, VARUG rep, 604-984-4067" Subject: "Learning Perl" by Schwartz BKLRNPRL.RVW 931115 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. 103 Morris Street, Suite A Sebastopol, CA 95472 800-998-9938 707-829-0515 fax: 707-829-0104 info@ora.com "Learning Perl", Schwartz, 1993 One of the advantages of the Apple II computer (Yes, son, I *am* old enough to remember that. Now put that lollipop down and listen) was the Applesoft tutorial on the BASIC computer language. With a steady pace, interesting examples, some wit, and a reasonable curriculum, it taught tens, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people, how to program. It taught them BASIC, of course, which was a fatal flaw, but you can't have everything. The loss of the tutorial book, in the IIg and Mac lines, was a regrettable happening. "Learning Perl" may not take its place entirely, but it comes close. The humour is definitely there, starting even before the book does, in the foreword. Sometimes it is devious and subtle, as in the program which asks for "any last request" ... and then discards the input before informing the hapless user that the request cannot be performed. The pacing is realistic, as are the examples, although perhaps a bit slow to come to something useful, or likely to grab immediate attention. However, this book is not going to make many converts from the non-programming crowd. While chapter one is a very careful, step-by-step, approach to input and output, with some manipulations of text for error checking, chapter two immediately plunges into scalar variable and all operators, while three deals with arrays. Not that the sections are written poorly, by any means, but they would be a tad intimidating for the novice. For those who are truly keen to learn Perl, though, this is a good introduction. There are questions at the end of each chapter, and an appendix with the answers. Appendix B gives a brief introduction to using TCP/IP network sockets in Perl, and C covers other topics. The foreword promotes Perl as a general purpose computer language. If that is so, then it is a very complex tool and one cannot expect much of a tutorial. On the other hand, references to Perl tend to stress its capacity for building "quick and dirty" tools for text manipulation, primarily mail. If this is so, then some real-life examples, such as a rot13 reader or a program to extract articles from electronic digests, would have improved the work. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993 BKLRNPRL.RVW 931115 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 DECUS Symposium '94, Vancouver, BC, Mar 1-3, 1994, contact: rulag@decus.ca