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Minimal Perl For UNIX/Linux People Tim Maher August, 2006 | 550 pages ISBN: 1932394508 |
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| $44.95 | Softbound print book | ||
Foreword
Perl is a lamb in wolf's clothing. It has a ferocious reputation for incomprehensibility ("executable line-noise") and excessive power ("the Swiss-Army chainsaw"), but underneath lurks a kinder, gentler programming language than whatever you're using now.
Of course, Perl can be complex. After all, very few other popular languages have so many advanced built-in capabilities, which is one reason why it rates as one of the most sophisticated programming languages in widespread use today.
Fortunately, unlike many other programming languages, Perl also comes standard with one other vital feature: a gentle learning curve. You don't have to understand a multitude of high-end programming constructs before you can do useful work with it. If you're familiar with the basic tools of Unix/Linux -- grep, sed, awk, find, and the shell itself -- then many of the features of Perl will seem hauntingly familiar.
Perl's creator, Larry Wall, once described his language as "a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as 'Unix'". And that's precisely the direction from which this book leads you into the depths of the language; by showing how Perl has evolved 'Unix' into a dialect that is much more powerful, but also much easier to use.
If you're already fluent in Perl's mother tongue, and want to discover how expressive and poetic Perl itself can be, you could have chosen no better primer than this book and no better guide than Dr Tim Maher, a gifted teacher and a decorated veteran of both the Unix world and the Perl community.
So, welcome to Perl! You don't have to come from *nix to work here ... but it certainly helps.
Damian Conway
DESCRIPTION
Foreword by Dr. Damian Conway, author of Manning's best-selling Object Oriented Perl
Most books make Perl unnecessarily hard to learn by attempting to teach the whole language, including its many redundancies, while ignoring the reader's knowledge of related languages and concepts. This book makes Perl easy to learn by teaching a strategically designed subset that's familiar to UNIX/Linux people, and by capitalizing on their existing knowledge rather than ignoring it.
With this book, readers learn a carefully designed subset of the language called "Minimal Perl", which was developed through five years of experience in training software professionals at major corporations. It makes Perl more accessible to those having UNIX/Linux skill levels ranging from elementary to expert, by capitalizing on their existing knowledge of important utilities (grep, awk), or essential concepts (filters, command substitution, looping). Dozens of detailed programming examples are shown, drawn from contemporary application areas such as system administration, networking, web development, databases, finance, HTML, CGI, and text analysis.
Learn how to:
- Exploit the power of Perl while avoiding its complexities
- Capitalize on your existing UNIX/Linux skills to learn Perl quickly and easily
- Write simple yet powerful programs that do important data processing tasks
ABOUT THE AUTHOR...
Tim Maher has worked for U.C. Berkeley as a Senior Programmer/Analyst, for the University of Utah as a Professor of Computer Science, and for AT&T, DEC, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, and Consultix (his own company) as a course developer and/or lecturer on operating systems and programming languages. Tim founded Seattle's SPUG, one of the oldest, largest, and most active Perl Users Groups, and served as its leader for its first six years. He serves on the Advisory Board of the University of Washington that oversees its Perl Certificate Program, and has led discussions in the Perl community about the development of a certification process for Perl programmers. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
He has trained thousands of engineers on Unix, Linux, and/or Perl and is a featured speaker at Perl conferences worldwide.