Comment by G3rn0ti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by G3rn0ti | Hacker News Reader

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> 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A little outdated but still great to read are: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.

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