About this book

This book is for developers who want to get up to speed with Perl quickly through concise tutorials (about 1 screenful in size).

Being concise is one of the primary goals. In the age of stackoverflow and blogs and info graphics everyone is in a hurry. People shouldn't have to wade through unnecessary prose. I literally review each sentence in each article and try to remove unnecessary words.

In order to keep things short and to the point I've also chosen to be opinionated and intentionally left out some dicussions and edge cases that were uncommon or not essential. Instead I've tried to link to more information.

Motivation

I wrote this book accidentally during a vacation. I started typing and everything just fell out of my head.

This book tries to solve a problem I keep having. I have been writing Perl code since 1998 and I love the language. However, I often run across good developers who are visiting Perl from other languages and having trouble getting up to speed. Over the years I've asked them about that struggle and anecdotally it seems to come down to roughly 3 things:

1. Dereferencing (confusing)
2. Object oriented programming (how?)
3. Random stuff they can easily do in their favorite language but don't yet know how to do in Perl (opening files, testing, templates, dependencies, etc).

I've tried to provide quick and simple explanations for the first 2 issues in this book. But my theory is most issues are due to the lack of a good, concise, easily digestable, easy to navigate, online source of information and answers in a single location. The information is out there but its not easy for new people to find. This is my attempt to solve that problem.

Contributing

I'd be blown away if you decided to support this work on Patreon.

This book is on Github. Feel free to report issues or send feedback.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.