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Reviewing the New Llama III
by Peter Scott
This year's Perl Conference celebrity book was the third edition of "Learning Perl," the famous "Llama Book." Every year, a new Perl book makes its debut at the conference; last year's was the third edition of the Camel, which I've already reviewed.
Llama III is still by Randal Schwartz & Tom; Only instead of Tom Christiansen, it's Tom Phoenix, a senior instructor at Randal's Stonehenge Consulting.
This book is totally different from the previous edition, even if comparing the tables of contents might make you think otherwise. The Stroll Through Perl in Chapter 1 is gone, presumably because Randal now places great value on explaining things in a particular order. Some of which I take issue with, but not too loudly because Randal does train more people in Perl than anyone else does.
For instance, he is very careful to talk about array elements ($fred[3]) before telling you about the array itself (@fred). Since you can't access $fred[3] under "use strict" without having first declared "my @fred", this requires walking a tightrope between teaching array and hash elements before teaching their containers, and then explaining about strictness. Those of us who take the approach of mandating strictness from the very first program aren't allowed this luxury.
Amazingly, not only are references still not explained in this book, but their only mention in the "Beyond the Llama" chapter is a small paragraph which all but suggests their function is trivial... this after referencing numerous modules ranging from POSIX to CGI.pm, and even giving examples of their use, all of which adroitly sidestep the use of references. This feat of legerdemain deserves some kind of award.
But these are minor gripes from someone who's on the other side of the learning curve from the people this book is intended for. The Llama does still tackle concepts as diverse as process management and DBM files, and (loud applause) no longer bothers teaching formats. The number of footnotes more than does justice to what we expect from an O'Reilly Perl book, and by a process of comparison and elimination, you can now tell just who's responsible for what type of jokes.
This book remains essential for anyone learning - or *teaching* - Perl. Upgrade to this edition as soon as you can.
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