Learning Perl on Win32 Systems
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Spotlight Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 3.48Customer Rating: 3
Summary: Shallow, but a Helpful Intro to Perl for Win32 People
Comment: I concur with the bulk of the reviews here: This is a shallow book, especially given Perl's scope. But it WILL help Windows folks understand many of the key Perl concepts that otherwise go unmentioned.
And that's the major point here. The book may be a trivial intro to Perl, but at least it doesn't assume you're a *NIX weenie. After getting annoyed reading the 3rd edition of the camel book, I bought this book. It was helpful in clearing up all those references to the weird stuff that *NIX dudes apparently are born knowning, and got me quickly into writing simple Perl scripts.
You want heavy details of the Win32 or NT-specific functions? Go read the POD embedded in those modules. Or get a different book.
This is "LEARNING Perl on Win32 Systems"... I read it in about 6 hours, total, cover to cover. And in that time it provided just about as good an intro as I could hope for.
Customer Rating: 3
Summary: Ok language intro, but missing context
Comment: This book provided a reasonable introduction to the language elements. As a complete novice, I learned enough to read CGI scripts. It was helpful to work on the well-done examples and then to look at the answers. I would have preferred a "log cracking" example rather than "secret words". Although I got the syntax of the hashes, I missed their glory in solving problems. The regular expression examples were good, but I could have used a full-blown example here also. This book sent me searching for CGI/web packages, such as the database package DBI (which may have been more useful than the DBM), the graphics package (GD), and more on writing HTML code from Perl scripts.
Customer Rating: 4
Summary: Easy to read, easy to understand.
Comment: I found that this book was good, particularly for the Win32 platform, and recommend it to anyone who uses Windows, regardless of their initial interest in programming. The only problems I had with the book are that the CGI (and OOP, which is introduced only in the context of CGI...but it could be so much more) chapter is left in limbo as far as being able to use any of the examples. If it were used on a Unix webserver (which are almost always setup to handle Perl CGI scripts), the examples would work fine. However, this is Perl for Win32, so IIS or PWS (if possible...I don't think it is, however) should be the web platforms targetted, and a "quick and dirty" setup instruction would be good to be able to test those examples.