Customer Reviews

Perl 5 Complete

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

if you have the patience to finish it! this book is packed with useful information with great depth, but its a bit dry and too thick for its intended purposes. it is a good buy to strengthen your perl knowledge and introduce you to do OOP with perl, however its not so ideal for a reference and i doubt anyone can finish this book cover-to-cover. i didnt finish it but for whatever chapters i have managed to read thru, they are pretty informative

This is one of the most unorganized books I have ever read. I just started learning Perl, and I used this book because it was available in the library. I read up to chapter 10. One big problem with this book is that the Index is very short and the book is huge, so most of the time I cannot find a reference pointer to the subject I am interested. The index is basically useless. So I have wasted a lot of time trying to find information about a specific subject by browsing the book until I found a relevant heading. There seems to be tones of information in this book but, the organization is terrible; it is as if they had just dumped a lot of scattered information into one book, without beeing concerned about the logical flow. After chapter 10, the topics are very advanced, but they are not introduced properly. There is the assumption that you already know a lot of object oriented programming. I have given up on this book and threw it away. I never write book reviews but I felt compelled to do it today, because this book just got to my nerves by wasting so much of my time. I hope you don't waste your money on this book.

If you are wanting to learn perl, this book will help you do that. It jumps in quickly into how to code perl, so be prepared. If you have coded C++, then this perl won't be that hard with this book. However, if you've never programmed before, then this is not the book for you.

Once I had learned perl, I found this book to be a 500 page paper weight. It does little good as a reference.

Review no. 25 has it wrong about the recursive function; the program on Page 151 is NOT an infinite loop. I committed an error in trying out that recursive function. Given the number of errors in the book, it was easy to assume that it was a typographical error! I have read more of the book now and the density of errors actually decreases in the latter half of the book. I am therefore increasing the number of stars to three (from two).

I have read through a good portion of the book - however, I am not new to Perl. This book is riddled with errors. For instance, take a look at the function simple_recursion on page 151. This is an infinite loop! On page 216, the author talks about dereferencing complex data structures and describes (very poorly, I might add) - three rules, numbered 1,2 and 3. And then he refers to the nonexistent rules No.4 and No. 2b on page 218! These are just a couple of instances that I have mentioned here. Virtually every page has such errors that it really takes the joy out of learning new concepts. If you are new to perl, stay away from this book. Pick a copy of the Llama book, or better yet, buy the PERL CD bookshelf. Read the Llama book first, cover to cover. I am giving this two stars - because there is some good in it if you read it in conjunction with the Perl CD bookshelf. I really think that McGraw Hill should give the (corrected) second edition free to those who unwittingly bought a copy of the first edition.

I feel very strongly that the publishers of this book should provide an errata sheet as the sheer quantity of errors completely spoils an otherwise excellent book. This was the first book I bought on Perl and it had me very confused, though as other reviewers have noted figuring out the errors for myself probably improved my understanding. To McGraw-Hill - can I have a discount on the next edition?

I am currently using "Perl 5 Complete" as a first exposure to Perl. The problem I have with recommending the book is that many examples that I work with do not run because of typos. What makes matters worse is that there does not seem to be any way of obtaining an errata sheet! I have contacted both the authors and the publishing company to no avail. Who takes responsibility?

This is by far the best Perl5 book ever written. I have been puzzled by all those programming related books these days: with all advacned word processing techniques, can they "pretty-print" example programs so that readers may get the idea very quickly ? Who has enough time to go through all those examples line by line ? First, this book goes beyond such pretty-printing. Important parts in the programs are well-marked, additional explanations are typed in small cases and pointing to the appropriate places using arrows, related parts are connected using lines and arrows. When you look at the examples in the book, I don't need to go through line by line. The concepts are immediately coming through my eyes to the brain, by looking at the example. Second, the example programs are as good as in many other authoritive books (like Perl5 Cookbook). And there are so many examples in the book. Finally, the structure of the book is one of the best. One minor problem would be there are as many typos as in Perl5 Cookbook. But unlike in Perl5 Cookbook, I can ignore such minor typos, since I already got the concepts of the example program by simply looking at it. In summary, if you need only one book for perl, this is one. Also, I would recommend this book to anyone who has been embarrassed by Perl. An extremely user-friendly book for anyone who has any programming experience (ie. this book does NOT teach the basics of programming).

This book has great examples and I liked the sequence it was written in, there are a few typos but nothing the reader can't figure out, also some of the code is not explained sufficiently, overall the best Perl book I've found.

peter.rios@mciworld.com

After reading snippets of this book from time to time, and being frustrated and amazed at how many errors in how many code snippets could get through the editors, I finally turned to this website to see if others had observed the same problem. The first couple of reviewers hit the nail on the head. The index is a joke. The multitudinous typos in the code have me going to my machine just to check my understanding. It's become difficult to believe or trust anything in this book, but like one other reviewer said "Maybe that's a good thing." The book could be used for a contest - see how many errors are possible when the editors don't give a damn. Shame on you McGraw Hill for allowing this book to hit the shelves - you should do a mass recall - send in the front cover and get a corrected edition. It seems that the authors at times really know their stuff, and could teach a lot, but this is all foiled in error, after error, after error. I just got done reading a two page spread that had five code snippets - I believe three of these had serious printout errors. (I haven't confirmed this yet, but I'm getting tired of incorrect code.) Fire the editors, or whomever rushed this book to print, just to get shelf space - what a sad statement on American publishing - get that shelf space - I think that person should get out of publishing and go to work for Coca-Cola or Pepsi and let the book world alone. Terrible business practice. The other reviewers who give this a five star review are probably friends of the authors - sorry, guys, but this book with this edition should be trashed - it reminds me of the poor quality that TAB books used to put out - BTW, weren't they purchased by McGraw-Hill a number of years ago - could the same marketeers still be there - RECALL THIS BOOK MCGRAW HILL IF YOU HAVE ANY DECENCY - CONGRESS WOULD FORCE YOU TOO IF YOU WERE MANUFACTURING CARS!