How to Find Out More

The classic Perl reference is known as the “Camel book” (because of the picture on the cover). It is very thorough and would be a good choice for an experienced programmer who wants to really understand Perl.

Wall, Larry, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant. Programming Perl. 3rd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2000.

The “Llama book” is a shorter and more introductory work. If you are relatively new to programming, this might be more approachable, although it does not cover the language in the same depth as the Camel book.

• Schwartz, Randal L., Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy. Learning Perl 4th ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2005.

Perl comes with extensive documentation. The command perldoc can be used to access this documentation. For example, perldoc perlintro displays an overview of Perl, and perldoc perl includes a list of the other documentation pages. The same documentation, with a more user-friendly interface, is available on the web at

• http://perldoc.perl.org/

Three excellent web sites for Perl information are

• http://www.perl.org/

• http://www.cpan.org/

• http://www.perl.com/

ActivePerl, a Perl implementation that can be downloaded for many platforms, is found at

• http://www.activestate.com/

Another good place to learn about perl is the newsgroup comp.lang.perl.misc. This is a good place to ask questions about the language. Be sure to read the newsgroup FAQ before posting.