A.P. Lawrence

Perl Cookbook

Order (or just read more about) Perl Cookbook from Amazon.com

This is designed to be the companion to Programming Perl. Unlike its that book, where the examples are often tersely explained if at all, this book has complete and often quite detailed discussion about each program presented.

However, it does not (and is not meant to) stand alone. You'll still need Programming Perl or some other reference if you don't already know the basics.

Well organized, well written, with several hundred recipes in all. But don't trust the recipes if you aren't an experienced programmer, because at least some of them are wrong. For example, I just happened to notice that the example program on page 361 that supposedly could be used to sort mail files is actually incorrect: it would not work correctly in the real world. Apparently the author never tested it with real mail files, or his testing wasn't rigorous enough (the problem is that it reads in paragraph mode; that can't work for mail files because the end of one can blend right into another with no intervening space. See /Unix/mailsplit.html for an example of this).

As with most O'Reilly books, the example source and errata lists can be found at http://www.oreilly.com.

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