Sunday, August 2, 2009

I want to learn Perl. Is Larry Wall's famous Programming Perl still OK to use if 2nd edition?

A third edition is available to buy, but second edition is available at library for free. Is it worth buying 3rd edition?

I want to learn Perl. Is Larry Wall's famous Programming Perl still OK to use if 2nd edition?
The 3rd edition came out in July of 2000 so that means the 2nd edition is fairly old. You can see all the updates that have occurred since then at the Perl site.





http://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist.html





A lot of it is still relavent with the latest release, however, just be aware that some of it may be somewhat outdated or deprecated. For the list of changes, you can go here.





http://perldoc.perl.org/index-history.ht...





Most of the updates were fixes for bugs and/or cosmetic changes so you could get by using the 2nd edition. Just skim over each of the updates posted in the 2nd link to watch out for any major caveats.





Personally, I would go out and buy the 3rd edition if I didn't already have it. It's handy enough to keep nearby.


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