Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best PERL 5 Reference available, 12 May 1998
By A Customer
This is a great book for those of you out there that have some knowledge of programing (esp C & C++) and are looking to learn PERL. The first 50 pages goes into PERL a little bit to get you started. It's cheap, it's powerful, it's informative, how could you go wrong with this book?
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Mediocre at best. Not a quick reference. Too many typos., 28 Jan 1999
By A Customer
Despite claiming to be a quick reference book, this book doesn't functionwell as such. It starts off with a reasonable basic tutorial which is a goodintroduction to the language. It's concise, but tells you what you need toknow, although obviously there is a limit to what can be covered in 45 pages.However, the 3/4 of the book that is the quick reference part is horriblyformatted, making it very hard to look something up quickly. E.g. every entryhas bold 'Compliance' logos (for NT, perl4 or perl5), which draw the eye, making the definition of each item, which is what you really wanted to see,hard to pick out. The absence of a one-line definition also makes it hard tofind what you want unless you already know the name.It is also completely lacking in useful summary tables of the variables,functions etc, even in alphabetic order, never mind by purpose, so you haveto flick through page by page looking for something you want. A table showingthe long and short equivalent names might be nice too. The page headers don'ttell you whether you are in variables, functions or operators either, onlythe first entry on the page -useless. The lack of tables is perhaps not _too_bad if you already know what you want, so more experienced users might notfine it so annoying, but it dramtically reduces it's utility as a'quick-reference' book.There is also an enormous number of mistakes, both in the examples and in thelayout. One appendix is in twice, under different titles! I find it hard tobelieve that anyone proof-read it.Over all, whilst it enabled me to get started with Perl, I found it deeplyunsatisfactory, and I am now going to buy a decent book. Not worth the money.
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