Tom Christiansen

Like any cookbook, culinary or computery, the Perl Cookbook is best enjoyed as a reference. While reading it from cover to cover will result in a deeper understanding of Perl problem solving, this book belongs on a shelf, watching over you while you work, until you hit a wall (the same wall you banged your head against until you started using Perl). Then, you just flip to the appropriate recipe, ordered by type, and with that, most of your problems are solved.



Christiansen and Torkington show more have put together a fabulous collection of recipes, some being the everyday practices of an avid Perl programmer, while some are more esoteric, coming along only when you need to consider bytes instead of lines in a file, or need to write an RSS reader/feeder. You know, things that don’t normally come up to most people.



I was impressed by the breadth of this book, and the coverage of its topics was well satisfying. It’s no wonder I look for the “O’Reilly book” first when picking up a new computer text.



Well worth the time of any Perl programming looking for some inspiration. show less

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 show more 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. show less

The "Camel Book", as this book is often called, is the Perl Bible. It's not only an exhaustive reference, but clearly written any *funny* to boot. The humour pervades the text, making a sometimes dry subject much more approachable.

No Perl programmer can afford to be without this book, and anybody considering writing a technical reference should refer to this book to see how it's done.

I would say that this is THE BOOK for learning Perl. Funny and easy to read.