Learning PERL the Hard Way

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• Learning PERL the Hard Way
• Allen B. Downey
• 1441419039

I was interested in the printed version of this book because it is done by a Print On Demand outfit called CreateSpace (but owned by Amazon). A lot of places are offering this now; I wanted to see the quality. There's no reason to buy this if you just want to read it: you can get a free PDF version at http://www.greenteapress.com/perl/.

The quality was about what I expected - decent, not great: no "lay flat" binding here. Paper quality wasn't bad either - I've certainly seen worse. Whether this actually represents what CreateSpace does is another question, however: the cover claims that this was published by "SoHo Books", who apparently creates books themselves and only markets through CreateSpace - if I'm following the trail correctly!

By the way, Amazon also offers digital distribution through its Digital Text Platform; I imagine they'll join these together at some point.

What about the content? Well, OK, yes, this is a nice little introduction to Perl. Sixty pages (sixty nine in the PDF). Certainly far less intimidating and a lot more helpful than the Camel Book (though you'll need that sooner or later anyway). I could carp about a few things where I definitely would have explained something differently, but as always that's just opinion - who knows which explanation you'd prefer?

Tony Lawrence 2009-04-06 Rating: 3.5