use strict; use warnings;
This is a book aimed at C programmers who want to learn perl. It doesn't teach you to program, as it is aimed squarely at people who already know C (or a related language such as C++). Similarly it doesn't waste time teaching you the parts of perl that are the same as C; it notes that they are the same, and moves on to where perl differs. To paraphrase the Ronseal advert, it's a tutorial that "does exactly what it says on the tin".
The classic first example in any programming tutorial is printing "hello world". So it's notable that this book doesn't start with "hello world". In fact the first chapter only has one perl script, midway through. Instead the first chapter describes where to find documentation on perl, how to find and download modules from CPAN (4th paragraph!), and how to use perl debuggers, both the builtin debugger and Tk's debugger. The prominence given to debuggers may seem strange to perl programmers, who are more used to inserting a print statement, but C, with its potentially lengthy compile and link cycle, means that it's often far more efficient to use a debugger, hence it is explaining perl in terms important to a programmer with a C background.
The author explains early on that he isn't going to regurgitate the perl documentation through the book; paper versions are "expensive, out-of-date, and more difficult to access than the stuff that comes with Perl." I wholeheartedly agree. Instead the end of each chapter has a "resources" section which gives the relevant perl man pages (expressed as the perldoc commands needed to view them), relevant URLs, and the names of all modules used in that chapter. This book teaches good habits: it emphasises where to find the documentation you need, it encourages code re-use (via CPAN), all the example programs are fully documented in POD, every open is checked, with a helpful die on failure, all the programs use strict; and use warnings, and all the CGI examples use taint mode too. The text is well written in style that is easy to read, and the light dusting of humour stops it becoming dry.
The second and third chapters explain the basics of perl; the parts that are similar to C, such as control logic, scalars and arrays. The book clearly explains the potential traps and pitfalls that are new with perl, such as the C trap of = vs == gaining a new twist with == vs eq. It explains the meaning of truth, and how perl's rules mean that "00" is true, which can come as a surprise. The book keeps to a minimum forward references to syntax covered in later chapters, but is not afraid to use them where unavoidable.
Chapter 4 explains regular expressions, and this is the first disappointment. Regular expressions are the greatest strength of perl, and will be new to most C programmers. Hence they would benefit greatly from a clear introduction to regular expressions. Sadly this chapter does not provide one. The author states that commenting regular expressions helps organise your thoughts, helps make sure all the parts do what they should, and helps subsequent maintainers. He starts using a commenting syntax like this
# ++--------- literal dot # ||++------- literal dollar # ||||++----- word character # ||||||+---- repeated 1 or more times if (/\.\$\w+/)and only later moves on to the //x flag. For the example that he comments both ways, he observes
Now are these 29 lines of comment regular expression easier to read than the line regular expression with its 24 lines of comments? Not that much really. It seems that no matter how you arrange a mess, it still looks like a mess.It's his book; he's entitled to his opinion, but I fear it will put potential perl programmers off one of the most important parts of perl, and consequentially they won't benefit from the full power of the language. Also, he missed the important objective point that his line commenting style will make maintenance pig as soon as any part of the regexp is edited to a different width - so in his example keeping the comment up to date could require 24 lines of editing for a 1 character tweak to the regexp.
His regexp examples get far too complex far too quickly. Barely has he introduced regexps, when he's starting to write regexps to match balanced quoted strings, including using negative look behind assertions. This is not a good idea - quoted strings, particularly with escaped quotes inside, are complex beasts, and the fearsome regexps they need are not good teaching aids. He also does something I've never seen any regexp tutorial do; he uses re 'debug' to try to explain how regexps work. The perldebug documentation says that the debugging output is aimed at debugging perl's regexp engine, not users' regexps. I think he's misunderstood its purpose, which is unfortunate as he spends a full third of his regexps chapter on it.
He doesn't provide any memorable overview of how regexps work. He doesn't explain that alphanumerics match as is, and only become meta-characters when preceded by backslash, whereas punctuation characters start off as meta-characters but become literals when escaped by a backslash. He doesn't explain that upper and lower case alphabetics are opposites, such as \s matching whitespace, \S matching non-whitespace. You won't learn regexps from this chapter - you'll learn to be scared of them.
The next chapters build logically, giving an overview of perl's new syntax (ie new to a C programmer), hashes, complex data structures, subroutines, modules, object orientation, advanced I/O and finally POD. This takes roughly until the middle of the book. The syntax introduction is logical, although there are several cases where subtly different new syntax is slipped in without any comment, such as x on a list instead of a scalar (page 61), adding a second argument to bless (page 157), and <> in list context (page 118). I would have hoped that the technical reviewers would have spotted these. The "new" syntax chapter attempts to cover all syntax variations you might meet (while wisely recommending not to use them) but doesn't mention hash slices, which are likely to confuse the unsuspecting. Also, there is a subtle but crucial error in the description of foreach - the books wrongly says that the loop variable is assigned - I pity the programmer who as a result spends considerable time tracing down a bug because he didn't realise that actually it is aliased.
The second half of the book puts it all together, with complete examples of perl programs. This half is somewhat disappointing. The programs tend to be presented complete rather than broken down by re-usuable functionality. There is no "here is how it would be done in C; here it is in perl" to show where perl has the advantage over C, and how to translate your thought process from C to perl. There are comments on how the programs work, but they are not overly detailed because most of the examples are not that complex in function. The author is very thorough in his POD documentation, and 100% consistent in his use of strict and warnings, which is good. He also includes the complete listing of every program, and I make the ratio description:code listing about 1:2. In addition, about 50% of the description section is spent citing the code to explain how each section works. For contrast, I estimate that the ratio in the Perl Cookbook of textual description to code is 2:1. The examples can all be downloaded from the New Riders website (not the URL given on the book cover, which is currently a 404). Given that all the important code is stated in the descriptions, the book would be leaner and more efficient without the full listings, but it would then have a thinner spine.
Some related example programs seem to suffer from insufficient extraction of common functionality to modules, but most examples are careful to put their re-usable code in modules. Unfortunately, you can see that the author is from a Unix/C background (laid back lowercase, rather than SHOUTY DOS or VMS UPPERCASE) because he names all his example modules completely in lowercase. This contradicts the most important perl module naming guideline - all lowercase is pragma space, which is an unfortunate habit to get into if you ever want to contribute to CPAN. Also all the modules use @EXPORT exclusively, instead of the more polite @EXPORT_OK, and all sit in top level namespaces.
The CGI examples all use tainting, are careful to HTML encode all input they are sending out, and use modules whenever possible rather than hand rolled code. There is a note that input parameters can be array references rather than simple scalars if they are specified multiple times. There is a good section on basic security, so if this is your first introduction to CGI programming you'll have to unlearn things to make basic security mistakes. It suggests crafty ways of running a CGI script from the webserver for both the command line or Tk debuggers, which I'd never considered, but might turn out to be productivity boons. However the examples all use heredocs of HTML code, without even a mention of templating systems. For simple examples this is perfectly adequate, but if you're using this book as a first step into web programming, it doesn't teach you that it is good design to split content and presentation logic - you're likely to discover this only after you've build a legacy maintenance nightmare.
The perl code taught is not particularly idiomatic. For example, the author likes writing
while (1) {
my $line = <<IN_FILE>>
if (not defined($line)) {
last;
}
instead of the terser and clearer:
while (defined(my $line = <<IN_FILE>>)) {
There is also needless copying, that will start impact on efficiency. There
are several examples of the form
while (...) {
my @data = ...;
...
$accumulator{$key} = [@data];
}
for both arrays and hashes. Copying the array using the [ ]
anonymous array reference constructors isn't necessary because the
my will create a new array for @data on each
iteration, so it's more efficient to replace [@data] with
\@data.
There is no mention of autovivification of references, which is one of the major programmer advantages of perl over C. It's not clear whether the author is even aware of it, as his code is always careful to initialise his array references to [] before assigning to them. The author also likes using not defined ($hash{$key}) for an entry that will either exist as a reference or not exist - simply using inverting the order of the condition and writing $hash{$key} simplifies things greatly. Individually these are minor points, but together they mean that this book alone will never teach you to be a fluent perl programmer.
In summary, this book will do what it claims - teach perl to C programmers. If you understand C or a C like language, you can probably read this book through in under a day, and it will give you a grounding in almost all the topics you'd need to be a competent and effective perl programmer. Just skip the chapter on regular expressions, and use a good regular expression tutorial instead. This book does one thing, and does it well. However I suspect that this means that you will read it about twice, by which time it will give you the confidence and ability to find everything you need answered online, from which point it will remain on your bookshelf.