Perl for Win32 People

I know this book has been bashed by some of the Amazon reviewers. However, I think the book has a particular audience (no surprise by the title): new Perl developers who are not from a UNIX background. It succeeds for that audience.

I love the O'Reilly books on Perl, and this book is written by the most influential people in Perl (apart from Larry).

I come from a UNIX background, I still found this book helpful. In fact, I even bought the book for my brother-in-law, who wanted to learn Perl on Win32.

The Activestate Win32 Perl distribution was a baby at the time of the release - it would be nice if it could be updated, especially regarding Perl Package Manager. This is nitpicking, though.

To quote James Taylor, this book is "enough to be on your way". It gets the novice initiated into Perl and hungry for more. After that, there are some great O'Reilly titles (The Camel Book, the DBI book, the Sys Admin book) and Lincoln Stein titles (The CGI.pm book for web development, the socket book), as well as the Internet to move to.

I really love the O'Reilly Perl for Sys Admins book. It seems like I go back to that book and find something new each time.

Other Reviews

• Good start
• Ok language intro, but missing context
• Shallow, but a Helpful Intro to Perl for Win32 People
• Easy to read, easy to understand.
• Perl for Win32 People