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
- Perl 5 Desktop Reference (Johan Vromans, O'Reilly, 1996)
- CGI Programming on the World Wide Web (Shishir Gundavaram, O'Reilly, 1996)
- Perl by Example (Ellie Quigley, Prentice Hall, 1995)
- Software Engineering with Perl (Carl Dichter and Mark Pease, Prentice Hall, 1995)
- Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (David Till, SAMS Publishing, 1995)
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:
- Information,
Announcements, Patches, and complete source.
- New stuff on this page
- Referencing and
dereferencing. Shhh... pointers in perl!
- New
functions, statements, operators, and types.
- Compiler
directives - aver, deny, use, and no
- Objects
and Object Oriented programming.
- Dynamic
loading of external modules.
- API
enhancements, and embedding perl5
- Other
issues, discussion, ideas, and projects.
- Closing
and credits
- Perl5 man page