Lots of new books have hit the shelves recently. Osborne McGraw-Hill has two new titles, Debugging Perl: Troubleshooting for Programmers by Martin Brown, and Perl: A Beginner's Guide by Donald Thomas and R. Wyke. Perl! I Didn't Know You Could Do That, also by Martin Brown, is available from Sybex. Manning has another Perl offering in Data Munging with Perl by David Cross. Prentice Hall has published Perl How to Program by Harvey M. Deitel, Paul J. Deitel, T. R. Nieto, and David McPhie.
Lincoln Stein's latest book, from Addison-Wesley, is Network Programming with Perl. And last (and if judging by size, also least), O'Reilly has put out the mod_perl Pocket Reference, by Andrew Ford.
I recently picked up Network Programming with Perl. I'm only part of the way through it, but it is already more comprehensive than I thought it would be. He doesn't just rewrite appropriate parts of TCP/IP Illustrated and point to some modules. He gets down and dirty and shows how to write some mean network code with Perl as well.
So far, it's got a good prose/code ratio (crappy books are generally too weighted on one side or the other).
The quote from Jon Orwant on the back sums up my opinion thus far:
This is a superb book. Another splendid book from Lincoln, whose mastery and lucid exposition makes this a must-have for the serious Perl programmer.
From MaranGraphics, a subsidary IDG, comes a book on Perl so bad, you really can judge it by its cover. Their book, _Perl_, is part of their "Visual" book series, which has the tag "Read Less, Learn More". If there's one thing book consumers want, it's less reading.
The book devotes two facing pages to any one concept, big or small. For actual descriptive text, you only get 1/2 of 1 page. The bottom half of both pages are devoted to screenshots of pico. But, the biggest problem with the book is it tries to make Perl feel like VB. It is clearly aimed at the win32 newbie who's tring to get that durn CGI page counter to work. Fie. That sort of book has a place in the world, just not in mine.
I also bought the _Debugging Perl_ book, but haven't gotten into it yet. It looks like it has actual sentences, so it might be awhile before I get to it.
