Compuware Perl Class Resource List

Recommended Written References

Learning Perl

Written by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Christiansen, published by O'Reilly, ISBN 1-56592-284-0. Make sure you get the second edition (or later), the first edition was a little weak. This is an outstanding book for a perl beginner, and serves as a decent, though not complete, programming reference. Also called The Llama Book by those in the know. This would be an outstanding book to pick up as a textbook for this course.

Perl Cookbook

Written by Nathan Torkington and Tom Christiansen, published by O'Reilly, ISBN 1-56592-243-3. This book is wide collection of common programming problems, complete solutions, and discussions of how and why everything was done the way it was. An outstanding intermediate book, and a great way to understand effective ways of using the language. Lots of great boilerplate as well for problems you might be facing.

Programming Perl

The Camel Book. Written by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Randal L. Schwartz, published by O'Reilly, ISBN 1565921496. This book is the authoritive reference to the complete Perl language, and was written by the original author of Perl. Exceptionally complete and exceptionally thorough. Personally, I would recommend this book last of these three, as I feel it is a little TOO detailed, and contains the same information found in the Perl man pages. Jim Weirich however, would pick this book first, and pick the Llama book last, and he is both smarter and more experienced then I am, so you make your own decision. All three of these books are great books.

Recommended Online References

http://www.perl.com/

The Place for Perl. A great source for documentation, frequently asked questions, downloads, and general information about Perl. Should be required reading for the Perl user.

http://www.perl.org/

The Perl Mongers Sight. Another resource for everything Perl. A gathering place for Perl advocates.

http://www.activestate.com/

The official Perl for Windows. Is Microsoft embracing and extending Perl, or is Perl embracing and extending Microsoft? You be the judge. Either way, this is a good solid commercial quality port of Perl to the Windows platforms.

http://www.cpan.org

The Comprehensive Perl Network. A good resource for Perl components.

man perl

On a Unix system with Perl (properly) installed, this will show the root node of an extremely detailed and complete documentation tree for the Perl language.