Editorial Reviews:
Perl is one of the most important scripting languages in use today. Open source, freely available, portable, versatile, and robust, powerful and easy to use, Perl is the first choice for thousands of professional web developers. But Perl is far more than a scripting language for the web. Supported by a comprehensive standard library and hundreds of third-party libraries, Perl is an increasingly popular choice for application programming. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the Perl language. It covers the fundamentals of data types and file handling through advanced features like regular expressions, object-oriented programming, threads, internationalization, and integrating Perl with the C programming language. The latest version of the language, Perl 5.6, is used throughout, with commentary for those with earlier versions.
Perl is one of the most important and powerful languages available today, and Professional Perl Programming offers an in-depth guide to exploiting some of its best features. With a densely packed tutorial straight from the experts, it is suitable for any experienced developer who wants to get more from this language. Weighing in at over 1,200 pages, the text is dedicated to the principle that more is more, yet in covering the breadth of today's Perl, it doesn't ever lose sight of the practical details. One of the best feautures is its attention to running Perl in multiple environments. Early sections look at installing and running Perl on Unix, Windows, and the Mac. There is plenty of advice on how to run and deploy scripts, including excellent sections on the internals of Perl, autoloading modules, and creating installable modules for distribution. A practical, hands-on focus is the rule throughout this text, which features short code excerpts rather than full-length scripts. Early sections cover pretty much the entire Perl language in significant detail, from data types (including scalars, arrays, and hashes, which help give Perl its distinctive personality) to flow control statements and their scoping rules. An important chapter presents object-oriented Perl, including common class design constructs like inheritance. The emphasis of much of this book is on detailing the use of key Perl modules to perform basic and important tasks like file I/O, working with files and directories, process control, and networking. One notable section covers regular expressions with a clearly presented (yet sophisticated) tutorial to this essential Perl feature. (Besides the fundamentals, the book examines optimizing your regular expressions for better performance.) Later sections show you how to do networking in Perl, as well as how to get Perl to interoperate with C and even Java. The book closes with a concise listing of available Perl functions, as well as the most important Perl modules. Professional Perl Programming doesn't dumb the subject down. Perl is infinitely rich and sometimes difficult, and this book is up to the task. It succeeds at presenting a wide-ranging tour of today's Perl with enough information to please even experienced Perl programmers. It contains much to mine in the way of basic and expert material that any intermediate to advanced developer can use to do more with Perl in everyday programming projects. --Richard Dragan Topics covered: - Introduction to Perl distributions and modules
- Running Perl on Unix, Windows, and other platforms
- Intensive programming tutorial for Perl
- Numbers and strings
- Perl operators in detail
- Using scalars, lists, arrays, and hashes
- Complex data structures and typeglobs
- Expressions
- Statements and blocks
- Flow control and loops
- Subroutines
- Scope and visibility rules in Perl
- Including and using Perl modules
- Autoloading modules
- Creating installable modules
- In-depth tutorial for regular expressions (including performance tips)
- Perl file I/O and file handles (including working with files and directories)
- Command-line handling and shells
- Terminal I/O
- Warnings and errors in Perl
- Using the Perl debugger
- Automated testing and profiling
- Text processing and reporting in Perl
- Object-oriented Perl (including basic object-oriented class design features like inheritance)
- Perl internals
- Integrating Perl with C, Java, and COM
- Creating and managing processes in Perl (including signals, IPC, and threads)
- Perl networking (from sockets to higher-level Internet protocols)
- Techniques for writing portable Perl code
- Unicode support
- Locale and internationalization techniques in Perl
- Function reference for Perl 5.6
- Listing of standard Perl modules
Customer Reviews:
Displaying 1 to 5 of 6 total reviews (Page 1 of 2):
 WROX rocks
I initially didn't have time to read this book, and it made a much better reference than O'Reilly's book because it didn't assume you knew what you were doing. The index is nice, and the table of contents helps find anything you don't know the name for - it's all logically organized.
When I finally got around to reading it, it was actually a nice read too.
So far this has been my experience with all the Wrox books I've gotten. They cover well what they cover, but don't always cover everything.  very detailed but not easy to read
The book is very detailed and comprehensive, but it is not easy to read and probably not suitable for beginners. Specifically, it does not provide complete examples with inputs, code, and output. There are also plenty of typos and small errors. Still, in all fairness, this is a very comprehensive book with lots of topics not covered in other books. Also the paper is of good quality. Probably every advanced user should go through the book to pick up on things other books leave out. Highly recommended for a broad audience
This is a very good Perl book! For beginners, intermediates or even advanced programmers in Perl. The book takes you from the basics to advanced applied Perl programming concepts.
The book manages what many others fail to do: It might be the only Perl book you ever need. If you worked through this book, additional information is readily available on the Internet. This book is comprehensive enough to cover everything you need to know about the Perl language to write large scale 'mission critical' applications.
Admitted, if you already own the O'Reillys 'Learning Perl', 'Perl' and 'Perl Cookbook' this book will not contain many news. However, it is written very well and it is understandable, something I cannot always say about the 'original' Perl books or documentation.
If you do web programming, a logical addition to this book is 'Professional Perl Development' which offers lots of good information on how to design sophisiticated web applications. An excellent book for advanced programmers.
This is an excellent, thorough, fairly advanced book. Until now, I was an o'reilly zealot, clinging to my camel book and my CD bookshelf as the Only True Word. Finally, here is the first real competitor to that series of books, with a fresh approach to the language that shows that the authors really know what they are doing. So far, the book has done a great job covering all my industrial-strength perl questions with _examples that work_ and clear, concise explanations of the methods and the context. I find that the examples are really applicable to my professional needs as a contract perl programmer. There's a great section on object-oriented perl, as well as a good debugging section. IMHO, This is the best perl book out in a while.  Sinks Like a Wrox . . .
Let be begin by saying I'm a Perl evangelist. This is to say that I do my best to spread the word that the language is powerful and useful, yet still easy enough for the non-programmer to learn. I have begun to describe Perl as the "Layman's C." (I'm sure to receive some grief about this moniker.)I am, however, not a fan of Wrox. It has become cliche with me to peruse their works and find typos, gramatical errors, and faulty code. Just because Wrox puts out a heavy, red book doesn't mean they are doing the topic a service. Here is no exception. So, how to learn Perl? To glibly say 'code' would be too little. The O'Reilley books do a better job, and they are written by the core elite of the Perl culture. However, just because they can be called Perl elite doesn't mean they can't write resources that make sense. (However, I confess to finding a few typos and a missing parenthesis or two in their code as well . . . so nobody's perfect.) As a developer, I lean on Perl to handle things that don't need the strength of a systems language (e.g. C, C++, Java). The O'Reilley books are an excellent resource that have gotten better with age. But, let me let you in on a secret. Little of what you'll find in the "Camel books" isn't already available to you free. Perl's own 'man' pages form the core of the books . . . if you've got the time to print, then you've got a top-rate document on your computer. I can't give a book a one-star when it relates to Perl, unfortunately. More Customer Reviews:
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