Good book to learn PERL
Joy Scaria
Monday, 28 July 2008 01:20 UTC
My current project require me to learn PERL. I thought of starting with “Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics” by James Tisdall. But then I realise that to use that book probably I will need some foundation in PERL. So I thnking of buying the book “Learning Perl”, 5th Edition by Randal Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy. Does anyone have a better book/approach to suggest? Thanks
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Replies
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“Learning Perl” is great. But best is to learn while doing.
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I agree with Eric; learning PERL is all about “doing something”. Additionally, there is a plethora of PERL resources throughout the internet. So you might even consider just getting a quick reference guide.
However, to come back to your original question, I think that the book written by Tisdall does a good job introducing the basics of PERL.
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“Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics” is enough for staring perl learning. I have read a book of “Perl by Example”, Ellie Quigley. It’s also quite useful.
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I agree with others: the best way to learn any language is to find a good tutorial on the web and start coding. I own one Perl book – Perl Core Language Little Black Book. A little dated now, but I found it very clear when I started out and a good reference.
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I would also recommend “Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics”. (And don’t worry, It is a book for beginners.) I was very suspicious of it before I read it as I had previously wasted money on O’Reilly’s truly awful “Developing Bioinformatics Computer Skills”. However, I was quite favourably impressed.
I confess, I too started perl with a task I had to do, and bought (blush) “Teach yourself Perl in 24 hours” to plug the gaps. However useful the web is – buy a book. Books are good. They have code for you to write and run, so I don’t see that there is any conflict between reading and doing. Also a book is more likely to teach you good and safe practices, whereas scripts from the web may very well not.
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Thank you all for the replies. As you all suggested, I purchased (I mean through lab)“Beginning PERl for bioinformatics” and “Mastering PERL for Bioinformatics”. Since I dont have any programming experince at all, the learning curve is steep. After a weeks reading and working through examples, I am feeling much more comfortable. Later in October, I am thinking of attending PERL course from Cold Spring harbor Lab (http://meetings.cshl.edu/courses/c-info08.shtml). In some forums, if a novice asks a question, it gets summarily ignored, but I am happy that did not happen here. Again I am thankful for all of your replies.
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Sorry to be a pedant, but it’s perl or Perl not PERL.
More usefully, there are also a couple of newsgroups I used to use quite regularly which can be helpful. One is comp.lang.perl.misc and the other escapes me at the moment (sorry).
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Anonymous
Perl cookbook is good too. It has good examples of sorting and hashes.
Other books I found are useless for basic bioinfomatics: Intermediate perl, Advanced perl, Perl Hacks, Perl Best Practices. You can check these books at library and may find something useful.Mastering Regular Expressions has good perl examples.
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