Perl reference materials


Please Note:This web page is a relic from earlier years. By far, the best current source for Perl information is The Perl Language Home Page.

Books:

The two main books on the Perl language are published by O'Reilly and you can read more about them by following the links below (see also O'Reilly's Definitive Word on Perl page).

Recently, other Perl books have come onto the market. These include

Online Guides:

Patrick M. Ryan <patrick.m.ryan@gsfc.nasa.gov> has written a wonderful 21 page introduction to the Perl language.

The Taming of The Camel - An Overview of Perl 5.0 by Larry Wall

Perl slides from a talk by Tom Christiansen and revised by Kate Hedstrom <kate@gandalf.rutgers.edu>

Perl 5.0 Overview by Tom Christiansen in the Nov/Dec 1993 ;login:

The Texinfo version of the Perl manual is also extremely useful. Also see Robert Stokton's hypertext, searchable rendering of the Perl man page.

The Camel book (Programming perl) contains a number of sample scripts. The Llama book (Learning Perl) provides a set of exercises for which the solutions are available in Appendix A of the book as well as electronically. These scripts are available in tar'ed and compressed or browsable format below:

Also publically available is the Perl reference guide, updated for Perl version 4.036, which is included in the book Programming perl.

FAQs:

Before posting a query to the net, it is a good idea to check the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) lists. Often enough, the answer you seek is there. The FAQ list is available in several formats.

Man page:

The Perl man page, at approximately 190K, is another great reference source for writing Perl code. You can view the man page as a single large document by clicking here: perl(1), but because the document is so large, you are much better off using one of the guides below, as they break the man page into manageable chunks:

Newsgroup:

Perl is discussed in the newsgrounps comp.lang.perl.* You can read these newgroups from the WWW.

Perl Archives:

Perl scripts abound. Look to these sites for useful scripts or libraries for enlightenment when you have a project in mind.

Other WWW Perl resource collections:

All about perl5


If you have a suggestion of a resource to add to this page, or a bug-fix or correction, please use this form to send email to the maintainer. Thanks.
Back to UNIX Reference Desk
__
Jennifer Myers <jmyers at geek-girl.com> (Last modified: 11 Jun 1996)