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Comment by G3rn0ti | Hacker News Reader

The author wrote „Higher Order Perl“ which — to my knowledge — is one of the best books on programming ever written. While it’s got Perl in its title it is really an exhaustive introduction to the functional programming paradigm while being refreshingly non-academic about the subject. BTW: In general, I think there were many great Perl book authors having written very insightful introductory text books. They were mostly fun too read and taught me more about computer science than most computer science text books I had access too.

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Absolutely. The Perl library of the early 2000s stands head and shoulders above anything I've read since in programming. O'Reiily blazed a trail with their Perl library because Perl seemed to attract the brightest minds and the best writers. I think Larry Wall's background in linguistics played a part. I have a more or less complete set of Perl books from the early 2000s which I frequently dip into for inspiration. "Perl Best Practices" by The Damian is a particular favourite. "Programming Perl" and "Mastering Regular Expressions" are timeless masterpieces.

Can confirm. I have just started to re-read a few chapters (about Regexes and Unicode) of "Programming Perl" (4th edition from 2012) and "Mastering Algorithms with Perl" from 1999, and these books are really a joy to read.

Witty language, and just the right amount of complexity.

Although the number of pages is high, these books were produced with incredible attention to detail.

> ... many great Perl book authors ...

Would you mind listing a few of these?

I would add "Modern Perl" by chromatic: https://pragprog.com/titles/swperl/modern-perl-fourth-editio...

With lots of elegant examples, this book really shows that perl is not a write-only language.

> Would you mind listing a few of these?

Sure:

I already mentioned

Mark Jason Dominus: "Higher-Order Perl"

as it is a great introduction of functional programming and goes into all the gory details of how to implement lazy evaluation on top of closures.

Damian Conway: "Object Oriented Perl"

Comes to my mind as well. It's basically an introduction to object oriented programming so kind of similar in spirit to "Higher-Order Perl". It even talks about implementation techniques of OO protocols. Neat stuff.

These books are great even today as they transcend the Perl language.

A little outdated but still great to read are:

Randal L. Schwartz "Learning Perl"

Randal L. Schwartz "Intermediate Perl"

Brian D Foy "Mastering Perl" (my personal favorite in this series)

if you need to learn Perl 5 today.

I personally also liked

Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington: "Perl Cookbook"

which was basically just a large collection of programming solution recipes but usually also contained elaborate discussions on the various pros and cons of the corresponding solutions. I think it was in this book I first learned about the Fisher–Yates shuffle algorithm.

Brian D Foy: "Learning Perl 6" is a great book about Raku and is a more recent example of the great heritage of high quality introductory books about programming in the Perl domain.

(Nat Torkington here) Thanks for the kind words about Perl Cookbook! I had fun writing it and learned an enormous amount from Tom. The philosophy was that we show you the possible answers, tell you when each is appropriate, and then tell you how and why they work. You come for quick answers and before you know it, you've learned something! Every time I learn a new language, I wish someone had written a good cookbook for it.

Wow, thanks so much for your work! I had it on my desk for a long time because it was so useful. You are right every language should have a book like this!

It’s a good way to learn from because in practice you have these messy problems you’ll sometimes have to tackle from various sides before you push for a solution. Also software development is not about knowing all algorithms by heart but knowing when to reach for established work that is bullet proof and will save you and your organization a lot of headache in the future.

I'd add Network Programming with Perl by Lincoln Stein.

Somewhat more specific, and many of the libraries used are dated. But it did provide you with a huge amount of information, from writing simple echo clients with raw sockets up to fully multi process HTTP deamons, in a very accessible way.

Wonderful books! They had so much wit and were fun to read. I really enjoyed reading those Perl books. Maybe they were in the spirit of the Perl founder, who was/is a linguist and did not just write technical books, but almost technical literature. Haven't seen these kind of in-between-the-line writing in Python-land (or did I miss the good ones?).

I also bought a huge amount of Perl books as they're basically free + postage as the supply is much higher than demand.

The best one I've come across so far is from the guy that goes by "Ovid" (Curtis Poe). It had the right amount about the language, environment, package managers, popular libraries...etc. I liked the code as well.

Damian Conway's book Perl Best Practices. And here's the reason why I thought of it: at a previous job where we were stuck with a million lines of less-than-optimal perl code, and the original developers who only knew perl, we had to make a decision. Rewrite it in a more gentle language that suited our new developers too, or try to write better perl. Initially we went with better perl, we used a linter called perl critic that would refer you to specific sections of Damian Conway's book Perl Best Practices. We managed to write very nice code that pleased all the new FP enthousiasts present, and were able to onboard non perl developers (incl. myself) fairly easily. It didn't work out though. The problem? Our original perl developers were unable to work with our "flashy" new perl code. It might as well have been an entirely different language to them. As it often is, this was not a coding problem but a people problem.

This one is really good. I no longer work with Perl but it's one of the books that had the most impact on me. There are many things to take away from it no matter the language you code in.

I read Damian's Perl Best Practices book for insights into ways to improve my Perl coding, but since then I've found that the principles I picked up from it have significant improved my code in most other languages as well.

Seconded. Anything by The Damian is pure gold including his Vim videos.

To my mind, Perl Medic by Peter Scott is the best book I've ever read on refactoring and working with legacy code

Effective Perl Programming by Hall, McAdams, and foy has come in handy.

Randal Schwartz's Learning Perl (O'Reilly) also deserves mention here. It was fantastic--exactly what an introductory book for a smart audience should be. It had examples; it was informative and very clear; and it was succinct.

For the most recent editions of Learning Perl, Randal Schwartz has been joined by brian d foy and Tom Phoenix. I suspect that those editions are good, too, but I haven't checked them out.

It's instructive to compare Learning Perl, which was (I think) under 300 pages in its early editions, to Learning Python, which is nearly 1600 pages long in its fifth edition. There's a lot of value in the longer book---but these two books exemplify very different ideas about what an intro book should be.

Even the Perl man pages are one of the best programming language introductions and documentations, or at least were at the time.

Even the Perl error messages are great. I've worked in Python and C# since my years with Perl, and neither has error messages worth a damn compared to Perl's. Perl tries to tell you where you went wrong. The others just tell you what's wrong with them. It's ridiculous that it's the 2020s and learning a language still involves learning a compiler's error messages.

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