Good Book For Classroom Setting

I picked up this book for a class that I was teaching at my office. The goal of the class was to train HTML/CSS/JavaScript and/or Java programmers to code in Perl since a large portion of our code base is written in Perl. Overall, I think that the book was a good choice for the class for a number of reasons.

First of all, the book is already written with a classroom setting in mind. The authors have used previous versions of the book, titled "Learning Perl Objects, References and Modules", for their own courses. This updated version benefits from all of the hours of empirical testing that it has received in the classroom. There are many thoughtful additions like having all of the chapters close to the same size. This allowed for me to assign a single chapter per session and know that I could comfortably fit the lecture and discussion of the chapter into a two-hour session. There are also exercises at the end of each chapter and answers for those exercises (with discussion) in an appendix.

This book is good for getting people just learning the language ready for the TMTOWTDI/TIMTOWTDI aspect of Perl. Take something simple like opening files... there are at least four 'standard' ways to do it. The book prepares you for all of the different versions of annoyances/features like this that show up in Perl code by walking through the evolution of the feature.

Another reason that I like this selection of book is that data files and code examples are actually available for download. I've been shocked that some of the programming books that I've gotten lately actually don't have this addition.

Finally, the course that I'm teaching is for people who probably already know how to program, at least a little, but they don't know Perl. I didn't want to drag them through all of the picky details of the language by starting with "Learning Perl" or something equivalent. This book has been a good choice for introducing programmers to Perl. I do have to stop occasionally and explain some fundamentals of the language, but not too often... maybe I just work with smart (or shy) people :)

Of course, the book isn't perfect. As odd as it seems, one of the biggest complaints that I get is over the Gilligan references that are used in all of the examples in the book. There is also some coverage of packaging modules for CPAN. This is useful, just not for the particular class that I'm teaching, so we skipped that chapter. Of course, both of these complaints are pretty weak.

In short, this is a good book, especially if you are doing a training session about Perl.

Other Reviews

• Great reference to have on your bookshelf
• Intermediate Perl has good code, good examples
• A worthy (as expected) successor
• Good follow up to the The Llama, but poorly organised
• Good Book For Classroom Setting