Beginning Perl

What Hacker News says

1. mstFeb 2022
   The latest major release of perl is perl5 version 34, but whatever's in /usr/bin/perl on your distro is almost certainly sufficient for learning with (some of my large scale OO codebases are a bit pickier, but for scripting you're somewhat unlikely to notice the difference).

   Curtis Poe's Beginning Perl is a good all around introduction but I'm unsure if it's a good intro if you're aiming specifically for the text mangling side.

   For an uber-quick-start, I'd go with https://qntm.org/perl_en and then getting up to speed on the regexp side using the man pages linked from here: https://p3rl.org/RE

   Show morethread
2. vgy7ujmMay 2018
   For learning I would highly recommend the following books:

     Beginning Perl by Ovid.
     Modern Perl by chromatic.
   

   There are a lot of other good Perl books but some of them are getting old and it is better to already know a bit before reading so one can separate good from dated etc.
   thread
3. vgy7ujmJul 2017
   Nice to see you getting into Perl! For these types of tasks it is indeed very powerful and a great fit.

   Some suggestions for you to research to further improve your script:

   You are using a lot of shell commands in backticks like `rm -rf out && mkdir out`;

   This can be very useful if you want to capture the output of such commands, but it also runs the commands in separate processes using the shell programs. For much of what is in your script you can just use Perl! :)

   Read up on core modules like Archive::Tar and the various IO::* modules to start using pure Perl for what you need to do. http://perldoc.perl.org/index-modules-A.html

   Good books to read would be Modern Perl by chromatic or Beginning Perl by Ovid.

   Show morethread
4. vgy7ujmFeb 2017
   Excellent advice to learn Perl!

   Be advised that some of the books mentioned are old and while still good books does not teach modern style Perl. Beginners should in my opinion start with Beginning Perl by Ovid and Modern Perl by chromatic (first book in the article).

   thread
5. MithalduJan 2015
   You're incorrect in your realization. The truth is that the older books for learning perl are simply shitty.

   If you read Ovid's Beginning Perl, or chromatic's Modern Perl, you'll find they managed to explain the concepts very easily.

   thread
6. MithalduJan 2015
   > gurus

   It doesn't take a guru. Only anyone who actually cares about readability or learned from recent books like Ovid's Beginning Perl or chromatic's Modern Perl.

   The main problem Perl has is not anything to do with its language. It's all the old books from the 90s (that some diehard still recommend), but which teach outright shit when it comes to readable or reliable code.

   thread