Who should read this book

Effective Perl Programming is a book of advice and examples. It derives from my experience as a Perl programmer andespeciallyas a Perl instructor. The book is suitable for readers who have a basic understanding of Perl and a few months of practical experience programming in it. Because Effective Perl Programming is a guidebook, not a manual, readers will need access to a comprehensive reference. I recommend either the Perl man pages ( freely available in many forms, including Unix man and HTML) or Programming Perl .

Although I use a lot of Unix-derived examples in this book, most of what appears here is not specific to Unix. I thought about including Win32 Perl and MacPerl examples but eventually decided that the book would have more integrity and consistency if it didn't stray from Perl's "native" operating system. I do encourage non-Unix developers to read Effective Perl Programming , or at least to give it a careful look.