Book Review: Programming Perl

Albert Strasheim writes"Programming Perl was written by Larry Wall (originator of Perl), Tom Christiansen and Randal L. Schwartz. It it also fondly known as "The Camel Book" because of the cute camel on it's cover page. It is published by O'Reilly.

The book retails for $39.95 in stores. You can order it from amazon.com for $31.96 (excluding postage and packaging) by going here. There is also a ton of reviews by other people available here.

This book isn't for everyone. If you're completely new to Perl this book will probably be a bit too much (unless you're one of those people who teach themselves a programming language by reading source code). It is aimed, I think, at the intermediate to advanced Perl programmer, and is more of a reference guide than a tutorial. If you're complete new to Perl you should get "Learning Perl" (The Llama Book) from amazon.com by going here.

The Table of Contents looks as follows:

1. An Overview Of Perl
2. The Gory Details
3. Functions
4. References and Nested Data Structures
5. Packages, Modules, and Object Classes
6. Social Engineering (deals with security issues)
7. The Standard Perl Library
8. Other oddments
9. Diagnostic Messages

This book is truely a must-have for anyone who wants to get serious about Perl, especially considering the release of the Slashdot code in a week or two. :)) "