#439 Learning Perl

Book notes - Learning Perl: Making Easy Things Easy and Hard Things Possible by Randal L. Schwartz, Brian D. Foy, Tom Phoenix. First published November 1, 1993. Most recently published as an Eighth edition in 2021.

Notes

Learning Perl, also known as the llama book, is a tutorial book for the Perl programming language, and is published by O’Reilly Media. The first edition (1993) was authored solely by Randal L. Schwartz, and covered Perl 4. All subsequent editions have covered Perl 5.

I first read it in its second edition (1997). As of 2026, the book is in its eighth edition (2021).

Contents - Second Edition

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Scalar Data
Chapter 3: Arrays and List Data
Chapter 4: Control Structures
Chapter 5: Hashes
Chapter 6: Basic I/O
Chapter 7: Regular Expressions
Chapter 8: Functions
Chapter 9: Miscellaneous Control Structures
Chapter 10: Filehandles and File Tests
Chapter 11: Formats
Chapter 12: Directory Access
Chapter 13: File and Directory Manipulation
Chapter 14: Process Management
Chapter 15: Other Data Transformation
Chapter 16: System Database Access
Chapter 17: User Database Manipulation
Chapter 18: Converting Other Languages to Perl
Chapter 19: CGI Programming
Appendix A: Exercise Answers
Appendix B: Libraries and Modules
Appendix C: Networking Clients
Appendix D: Topics We Didn’t Mention

Source Code - Seventh Edition

Example sources are maintained on GitHub. They were last updated for the 7th edition Cloning to an example_source_v7 folder:

git clone https://github.com/briandfoy/Learning-Perl-Sample-Files example_source_v7

Source Code - Second Edition

Example sources are maintained at https://resources.oreilly.com/examples/9781565922846/. Cloning to an example_source_v2 folder:

git clone https://resources.oreilly.com/examples/9781565922846 example_source_v2

Credits and References