Mastering Perl, 2nd Edition

Appendix A. Further Reading

As I said in the introduction, the path to mastery involves learning from many people. Although you could adequately learn Perl from our series of Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, and this book (or even taking one of my Perl classes), you need to learn from other people too.

The trick is to know who to read and who not to read. In this appendix, I list the people I think are important for your Perl education. Rest assured that I haven’t chosen them to pump up my publisher’s sales—most of the books are from other publishers.

If you wondered why I didn’t cover some subjects in this book (besides keeping the book at a heftable weight), these books cover those subjects much better than I ever could.

Some of these books aren’t related to Perl. By this time in your Perl education, you need to learn ideas from other subjects and bring those back to your Perl skills. Don’t look for books with “Perl” in the title, necessarily.

Perl Books

Data Munging with Perl by Dave Cross (Manning Publications Co., 2001)

Extending and Embedding Perl by Tim Jenness and Simon Cozens (Manning Publications Co., 2002)

Although dated, this book gives you an idea what’s happening under the hood in perl.

Higher-Order Perl by Mark Jason Dominus (Morgan Kaufmann, 2005)

Nicholas Clark, the Perl pumpking for v5.8, said “Don’t only buy this book, read it.” Mark Jason has a unique view of Perl programming, mostly because he has such a strong background in computer languages ...