Programming Perl, 3rd edition by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant 3rd Edition - July 2000 Rating:

The newest revision of the flagship Perl book from O’Reilly and Associates, Programming Perl, 3^rd Edition, also known as the “Camel book”, has arrived. It’s obvious just from looking at (and holding) the new and the old books side by side, there are major changes, but also much of what we love has been carried over. The familiar and reassuring camel image still graces the cover, though the top tag line has changed from “Programming” to “There’s more than one way to do it”, more fitting Perl style.

First, the book report we all wished we could do in grade school. Both the height and width of the book is exactly the same, 9 ¼” x 7”, however the thickness is dramatically different, the old being 1 5/16” and the new being 1 11/16”, a difference of almost ½ and inch. The real news though is the number of pages, the old with 646 pages, and the new with 1067! The pages in the 3^rd Ed are noticeably thinner and it’s also a bit heavier.

Table 1: Physical Characteristics

The 3^rd Ed has been completely restructured into sections and chapters (the 2^nd Ed only had chapters). The overview gives a very good, well, overview of Perl as a language, how things are generally set up, and a good explanation of the data types (with some nice pictures).

“The Gory Details” is now an entire section, not just one chapter, because, well let’s face it; most of the details in Perl are gory. This section thoroughly covers pretty much anything you need to know about the Perl language. Most programmers will probably spend their time here.

The final 3 sections get into some interesting stuff, with “Perl as Technology” discussing some more advanced topics like Unicode, IPC, threads, the compiler, and the debugger. “Perl as Culture” is a great section that addresses using CPAN, security, portability, and even Perl culture and history itself. Finally, the “Reference Material” section provides the reference material for Perl, including functions, pragmas, and standard modules.

There are even a few new “features” which make things even more helpful. In the function reference, for example, there is an interesting icon system used in conjunction with function descriptions. The icons are used to represent how the function will interact with your program and internally with Perl. They specify things such as “uses $_ as the default variable” or “data returned from this function in now tainted.” Also, the black tabs on the sides of pages in the reference section make it easier to open to the place you’re looking for.

Overall, the new release provides more and simpler explanation about how to use Perl and associated things like modules, etc. This will help both the novice and advanced user, as it does not assume everyone reading it is a computer scientist. Programming Perl, 3^rd Edition is a good example of something you didn’t think was broken (2^nd edition), but now that you see it fixed, you can never go back.