Review: Mastering Perl

Posted by tripwire45 on Aug 28, 2007 3:20 AM EDT
CertForums.co.uk; By James Pyles
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I guess I was a tad surprised that O'Reilly's "Mastering Perl" is a first edition. After all, Learning Perl is in it's fourth edition and was published over 2 years ago. I was also surprised (I guess I don't keep up) that O'Reilly had published the first edition of Intermediate Perl over a year ago. Usually for a particular programming language, O'Reilly publishes a "Learning" and a "Mastering" book. I know Perl is no cake walk, but does it really need this much attention? Also, why wait four editions into "Learning Perl" before publishing more advanced texts on this language?

Even reading the back cover of this book, I got the sense that it might be walking a fine line between an advanced perl tutorial and a collection of "cookbook" type solutions. That said, the book does state that its focus is teaching the reader to create reusable Perl software which is an industry standard procedure. Reusing code would seem to be a no brainer in principle. After all, who wants to reinvent, or in this case, rewrite the wheel over and over again? The trick is how to pull off writing reusable code. This book is supposed to be about "a way of thinking about Perl programming" rather than "tips and tricks". That seems more like philosophy than tutorials. Let's see how this book pulls it off.

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