Book Recommendations
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I have always been a reading buff, so I thought I would present some recommendations for technical books that have helped me to progress in my programming knowledge. There are some things that are just nicer to learn from sitting down in a warm corner and curling up with a nice paper book. You may notice that I have a special fondness for O'Reilly books, as they tend to get down to the meat of programming quickly and pragmatically. They also have cute animals on their covers.
Perl Books
My first real technical job was programming a CGI application in Perl. It was my first exposure to CGI, and my first exposure to Perl (at the time, Perl 4 was the new kid on the block). Here are some great Perl books that can hopefully make your learning experiences easier than mine were.
Perl Cookbook (Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington)
- Visit the Perl Cookbook website at the O'Reilly website.
- Buy the Perl Cookbook from Amazon.com.
- Or, buy the Perl Cookbook direct from O'Reilly.
The Perl Cookbook is the book
every Perl programmer should have. It is laid out in a
"recipe" style so a programmer can quickly find out the
idiomatic, expert way to finish various tasks in Perl. It's like a
well-written, detailed, technical coding FAQ. If you program in Perl,
you should definitely
buy
this book.
Effective Perl Programming (Joseph Hall and Randal Schwartz)
- Visit the Effective Perl Programming website.
- Browse most of the book online.
- Visit the publisher website from Addison-Wesley.
- Buy Effective Perl Programming from Amazon.com.
This is an excellent text, split into sixty readable lessons,
that will give an intelligent programmer the nitty-gritty on the
idiomatic, expert way do program in Perl. It can take you from a
Perl newbie—familiar with Perl because of its syntactic
similarity to C or Java—to a Perl geek who can rattle off
Schwartzian
transforms with ease. It's aimed at a relative
newcomer, but still holds lessons for seasoned Perl
hackers.
General Programming Books
I think it is super important to be knowledgeable about general programming skills, such as style and organization, in addition to being an expert in any particular language.
The Practice of Programming (Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike)
- Visit the Practice of Programming website.
- Visit the publisher website from Addison-Wesley.
- Buy The Practice of Programming from Amazon.com.
This book attempts to make comments
on programming style and how to apply common sense to programming.
There's a brief overview on common language idioms and algorithms,
but the primary great thing about this book is that it teaches how
to program in a useful and practical way. Many of the examples are
a bit C centric, but Java and Perl examples are also present, and
the principles are applicable to any programming
language.