Dear Lazyweb

[solarbird]

Could some of you recommend good books on PHP and Perl, hopefully ones that are both textbooks and decent reference? Yes, I know there are good tutorials online. I am annoying in that I like texts made of paper or other, paper-like material. Also, I want to spend less time looking at screens, as I've done far too much of that over the last several weeks.

Despite this, recommendations for good online tutorials and other quick-up-to-speed systems would be appreciated as well. But I'm hoping for paper versions that are worthwhile.

Comments

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

I don't know PHP, but for Perl, you're in luck.

O'Reilly's got an excellent series. Learning Perl by Randal Schwartz is the gold standard - a very large percentage of professional perl programmers got started from this one. The second, larger volume is Programming Perl and is an excellent reference book.

The other book I really like is Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway. Perl is renowned for having many ways to do things. This book attempts to sort out which ways are better, in very specific practical ways. It doesn't hurt that Damian Conway is an excellent writer.

And also, The Perl Cookbook is a good book while learning. It has a lot of examples of how to do fairly common tasks. I used to refer to this one all the time, when I was in the 2-4 years experience zone. I think there is an updated version from a few years back.

[avram]

I'll second the vote for O'Reilly's Learning Perl and the Perl Cookbook.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I don't even thing you need Learning Perl. If you can get Programming Perl and have any grasp of a 4GL like Python or Java already, you should be up and running in no time.

Of course, the real secret to programming is even simpler: never debug an empty file.

Beginning Perl, James Lee, Apress

[tambyrd.livejournal.com]

I'm using this book right now to learn Perl -- a teeny bit chatty but I really like the way it is structured. It's tutorial, with exercises (and answers) (and downloadable source code), and lots of "why Perl does it this way" explanations.

http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/

Re: Beginning Perl, James Lee, Apress

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

Those explanations are all 'because the designers were on crack', right? :) I do use Perl occasionally, it's useful - but damn. Crazy language.

I don't know what's a good book on PHP (depressingly, PHP is the 'language' I am mostly paid to program in these days) but unlike Perl which is deeply, intensely confusing for the hell of it, it pretty much works the way you'd expect, just shitter. So you can just start coding stuff and use the online manual if you get stuck. All variables have $ signs, you can get the web stuff from $_SERVER, there's a function print_r($variable) that does a deep trace of the variable (struct members, array items, etc) so you can see what's in it... that's it, you're good to go. ;) Oh and make sure you set debugging level to DEBUG_ALL in your php.ini or with the function that does that, otherwise you will have no idea why nothing works.

[niac.livejournal.com]

All O'Reilly:

Learning Perl / Programming Perl / Advanced Perl Programming

Re: Beginning Perl, James Lee, Apress

[mattsnaps.livejournal.com]

My two cents on PHP development:

- The reference semantics and syntax suck.
- Use xdebug and Eclipse PDT.

[adularia.livejournal.com]

I don't have a good Perl reference either, but my favorite PHP book is PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson. It's into at least the third edition now. It assumes, fairly reasonably, that you'll be using PHP to build some sort of data-driven system. First six or seven chapters are on PHP, then it starts into building a web app.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

"Programming Perl", aka "the Camel book", is the canonical "if you have just one Perl book" book. (Like K&R, except they're completely different in the same way that Perl is different than C.)

[cow.livejournal.com]

I learned Perl via Programming Perl, and it was my first web language. It's an excellent tutorial, reference book, and bludgeon.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Programming Perl. the other books are good if you want to dive into random paradigms like their version of OO. (It isn't OO, but it looks smells and quacks like OO until you poke it the wrong way and then it moo's.)

Perl is significantly easier if you've had prior exposure to sed, awk and sh. For some reason I don't think that's an issue for you. :-)

I've yet to find a single good reference on PHP and I've gone through several books. PHP alternates between being well designed and "what chancrous gnome did they slice *that* off of". You can pick up language semantics in probably an afternoon of browsing the php.net tutorial. Most of using the thing effectively is learning how to structure your pages. If you're used to content and code separation, it'll be natural. If you want to mix stuff in wildly, it works that way too.

It's at least 3 orders of magnitude more pleasant than doing cgi's in perl. :-)