Re: (1)[0] ok but not 1[0]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:38:24 -0800, Florian Kaufmann wrote:

[...]

I would like to have a book for Perl what the book "The C++
Programming Language" is for C++. Something very clear, very concise,
clearly naming things and give things clear semantics. "Programming
Perl" is a good book, but in my opinion by far not as concise as "The C
++ Programming Language". To be fair I am a Perl novice, and it might be
to early to make such a statement.

Well, I'm not much of a C++ programmer, but I've read the Soustrup book,
and you're right that "Programming perl" isn't as concise (TCPPPL is very
terse, and it's got about the same number of pages as PP with a much
smaller font). But IMO, the PP book is much easier to read, understand,
and useful to get a grip on the language even if it leaves some of the
details unspecified. I wouldn't recommend someone'd try to learn C++ from
TCPPPL, but I do recomment PP for perl newbies.

On the other hand, a really *complete* reference book for perl may fill a
need.

Currently though, I would have to say that the best way to really lean
perl is to read the PP book (which is IMO the best book to learn perl),
read the man pages and write a lot of code/experiment to find out the
details you're missing. PP gives you a very good idea of the mind-set of
the perl, plus a good overview of all that's in it, but it's not a
complete reference manual for the language and in some places perl's man
pages are more complete and/or up to date than PP, though even the man
pages fall short of being complete.

I am writing a documentation for Perl for myself. I hope it turns out
more concise, at least in my view, as the documentation about Perl I
have currently in my hands. I am writing it to learn Perl, to order my
thoughts, my understanding of Perl. It has a lot of positive side
effects though
- I learn Perl pretty well
- I learn LaTeX a bit (i decided to write the document in latex) - I
learn how to efficiently edit LaTex files in Emacs - I learn more about
meta syntax notations. I am using an own syntax notation which I created
on this occasion (also to describe bash scripts), since I find EBNF and
the like quite cumbersome. It's more for the fun of it, to have
something I personally like better, not to have something which is
better by objective means.

What are your plans for this documentation? I'm sure people are
interested.

Cheers,
Joost.
.

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