Here's a sample of the books that I've either used to learn Perl with, or that I use now for reference, along with one or two that I have heard were helpful to others. I hope you find these helpful. :-) Note: In addition to these, I have an enormous stack of books from O'Reilly press such as Apache: The Definitive Guide, DNS and BIND, Sendmail, Practical C Programming, Exploring Expect, Practical Unix and Internet Security, MySQL and mSQL, and Webmaster in a Nutshell. In my experience, any O'Reilly book is a good O'Reilly Book.
NOTE: the "Buy from Amazon.com" links will add the book to your Amazon shopping cart. You can remove it later if you accidentally do this. :-) Click on the cover image link to get more information about the book(s) including reviews.
| This is the ultimate first stop on your way to learn Perl, in my opinion. I got the first edition many years ago for Perl version 4, and if you follow the exercises, it will be very useful to you. The authors are recognized super-master Perl gurus, and the writing is (or was for me, at least) pretty easy to follow. | |
| Once you get past Learning Perl, you'll find Programming Perl to be fantastic to have around as a reference. You can quickly look up Perl functions, and find out how to use them. It's more advanced, but I couldn't do without it. | |
| This is another must-have for reference on JavaScript. It's not an introduction, though, so you might want to start with something easier. However, I use this all the time whenever I want to find out how to do something tricky with Javascript. This isn't something that will necessarily teach you Javascript, but it lets you look up Javascript functions, and gives you an idea of what will work on various platforms. | |
| Dang it! Amazon says this book is no longer available. You can try to get a used one, though. Perl/Tk is a very Cool Thing. With the Perl/Tk interface, you can write programs in Perl to run under Windows, the X-Window system (such as is used on Linux and Unix) and other graphical kinds of environments, I'd imagine, though I've only tried it on Windows and Unix. This is fairly advanced, but it's nifty. | |
| This is another must, as far as reference goes, once you've learned a bit about Perl. The Perl Cookbook has many "recipes" for doing darn near anything you'd ever need to do with Perl. Again, like the Perl/Tk book, it is more advanced, but there are many tasks for which the authors give you cut-and-paste code which is usable immediately. I wouldn't be without this one. | |
| Now, I don't have this book. But I put it on this list because it is from O'Reilly Press, and their books just...well...are the best I've found. From my brief survey of this book, I found it to be well-reviewed, but it is NOT an introduction to Perl, so you'll definitely want Learning Perl or similar introduction first. | |
| Okay, this is another one that I do not have, but others have said it's a decent introduction. Basically, as I understand it, they take Matt Wright's scripts from Matt's Script Archive, and break them down for you to explain how they work. I can't really recommend or not recommend it, but I hear mostly good things about it from beginners. | |
