Reviews for Perl: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides (Osborne))

1. Not very well explained - if at all.

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2002

   I had high hopes for this book, having read the other 2 excellently explained HTML and JavaScript books in the same "A Beginner's Guide" series but I was let down. I am a beginner Perl programmer wanting to learn Perl mainly for dynamically generated web pages (for form responses, taking and storing data from users, etc.). This book has given me a start and I have learnt a fair amount to be fair, but the explanations are not good. The authors introduce brand new concepts with maybe not very much explanation.

   Example: Having read the section several times, I am still confused as to what bit-manipulation operators are for and how to use them. "Now, using this truth table, you can figure out how the bit-manipulation operators compute their results". There's no explanation of what a truth table is for non-mathematicians or what the X,Y and Z columns represent - I'm confused.

   A lot of the book relies on looking at programming extracts, with little explanation, to understand the concepts - you need examples, but not without the theory. Either this or you're constantly referred to the Perl documentation (which is a load of web pages you download with Perl ActiveState - which you need to use Perl) for what I would say are fairly key bits of info you may well want to know (even as a beginner). This is great, but I spent my money on a book to have it on my lap while I program - not to flick between applications on the screen.

   Also it's not easy to look back to re-read a bit you learnt because new words and bits of code are not necessarily titled: they're just introduced in the middle of a passage.

   Neither of the authors are teachers (like Wendy Willard the author of the HTML book), not that this should matter (John Pollock who writes the JavaScript book isn't as far as I know), but unfortunately it shows. I am now searching Amazon for another book.