Perl Cookbook (original 1998; edition 1998)

Anyone who is even slightly familiar with Perl presumably knows about the Camel Book (Programming Perl), but this indispensable companion is somewhat less well-known. That's a shame, because I find myself reaching for this more frequently than for the Camel; once you know the basics of the language, the Cookbook is a wonderful time-saver when you need a particular trick or technique. More than once I've spent an hour or so working out the details of a finicky regexp (a completely generic number-recognition expression, allowing for scientific notation and the like, is the first example to come to mind) only to find them helpfully supplied as examples in the Cookbook. Very highly recommended. ( )