Perl Cookbook

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1. G3rn0tiApr 2022
   > Would you mind listing a few of these?

   Sure:

   I already mentioned

   Mark Jason Dominus: "Higher-Order Perl"

   as it is a great introduction of functional programming and goes into all the gory details of how to implement lazy evaluation on top of closures.

   Damian Conway: "Object Oriented Perl"

   Comes to my mind as well. It's basically an introduction to object oriented programming so kind of similar in spirit to "Higher-Order Perl". It even talks 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   A little outdated but still great to read are: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: "Perl Cookbook"

   which was basically just a large collection of programming solution recipes but usually also contained elaborate discussions on the various pros and cons of the corresponding solutions. I think it was in this book I first learned about the Fisher–Yates shuffle algorithm.

   Brian D Foy: "Learning Perl 6" is a great book about Raku and is a more recent example of the great heritage of high quality introductory books about programming in the Perl domain.

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2. hsmyersApr 2011
   Regardless of their slightly dated information, I'd add to your list the standard 'Perl Cookbook' by Christiansen and Torkington. Likewise 'Programming Perl' by Wall, Christiansen and Orwant. While not perfectly up-to-date, the reader should be able to immediately use the code and if necessary refactor later. Come to think of it the editions I have are of a same vintage as 'Medic' so same advice applies...
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3. gnatAug 2024
   "Learned" in University but it wasn't until Jeff Friedl's Perl Conference talks that I really became one with the regex engine. He taught you how to think like the regex engine and thus how regular expressions would be interpreted and thus how to write them. Then I got a master class in RE from Tom Christiansen when we were writing the Perl Cookbook.

   Jeff wrote "Mastering Regular Expressions", which grew from that talk. You probably want a copy even though it was first released in 1997. For the mindset of RE, you can't beat it.

   Learning REs is a roll through:

      * how matching happens (advancing, matching, backtracking)
      * using * ? and {} to match repetitions
      * greediness and stinginess within the RE
      * character classes, both [manual] and escapes like \s \W etc
      * anchors and "what a line is"
      * grouping and backreferences
      * accessing groups outside the RE
      * substitution and access backrefs in substitutions
      * find ALL the matches
      * complex parsing (just don't, it's rare not to regret it)
   

   and then it's an absolutely epic deep-dive into the minutiae of what line starts and ends might be, Unicode and regex, code to be executed from within the regex enging, using code to BUILD regex and worrying about when escaping happens or doesn't, denial of service regex, etc. that will take you through ASCII, various Unix tool chains over time, and a bunch of other fun stuff.
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4. gnatApr 2022
   (Nat Torkington here) Thanks for the kind words about Perl Cookbook! I had fun writing it and learned an enormous amount from Tom. The philosophy was that we show you the possible answers, tell you when each is appropriate, and then tell you how and why they work. You come for quick answers and before you know it, you've learned something! Every time I learn a new language, I wish someone had written a good cookbook for it.
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5. erikkriJan 2021
   Looking at whois history sites, it looks like the domain was owned by Tom Christiansen aka tchrist, which wrote Programming Perl, Learning Perl and the Perl Cookbook.

   The record wasn't supposed to expire until 2029, so not sure how the squatters got this domain.

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6. draegtunJan 2013
   Related SO post/comment - Oh Yes You Can Use Regexes to Parse HTML! - http://stackoverflow.com/a/4234491/12195 (HN - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741780)

   This comment is from Tom Christiansen of Programming Perl / Perl Cookbook fame which includes the following caveat:

   So while it certainly can be done (this posting serves as an existence proof of this incontrovertible fact), that doesn’t mean it should be.

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