Great PERL book.

[michaelsanford]

I decided a week ago that I really should learn PERL, even though I use PHP for all my web programming, PERL is so useful for local shell scripting, which I am doing more and more.

I was at my university bookstore yesterday and found a book by Qué, "PERL 5 Quick Reference", it was on sale for $28 (Canadian).

It's great, f you know any PHP or C (or any programming for that matter) this is a great little reference, with a complete function and construct listing and explanation of PERL flow control.

[MacMarshall]

O'Reilly publishes the "canonical" Perl books: "Programming Perl" and the "Perl Cookbook". These books are written/blessed by Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl.

I've started on another book, "Object Oriented Perl," by Damian Conway. When your Perl apps start to get big, (maybe 500 lines), it's time to break them into modules and use objects. I wish I'd read Damian's book sooner.

One thing nobody ever told me - Perl lets you create compound data structures, such as arrays of hashes, or arrays of hashes of arrays, etc.

[michaelsanford]

Yeah, O'Reilly does make some great books, I'll check those out!

I started out with this one because it was on sale...