Mastering Perl

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 Mastering Perl (or even taking a Stonehenge Perl class), 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. Don’t worry about this being a way for my publisher to increase sales because 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)

• Extending and Embedding Perl by Tim Jeness and Simon Cozens (Manning)

• Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs by Mark Jason Dominus (Morgan Kaufmann)

  Nicholas Clark, the Perl pumpking for perl5.8, 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 in general. His title refers to the idea of higher-order functions, a technique in functional programming ...