When I decide to start studying a certain programming language, I usually check amazon reviews and forum posts for a good book. With Perl , there was one name that appeared everywhere, Randal Schwartz. Learning Perl by Schwartz, phoenix and brian d foy was THE book to learn perl according to the majority of programmers. I bought the book(5th edition) and absolutely loved it. When I was almost done with the book, I saw that O’reilly had a video course available. Video courses are always an awesome compliment to a great book. This course exceeded every programming course that I have done(on video).

This is a near perfect video course. I absolutely love the stories Randal has and his way of presenting material. I advise anyone who wants to learn perl to get this course and his book because there is no simpler and fun way to go about it. Randal understands his audience well. He knows what a beginner will find difficult and he spends a considerable amount of time on confusing aspects of the language. PERL is not like any other language in my opinion. I really like how he explained and introduced Regular Expressions. Regex is something every programmer should know. I agree with the other reviewer who said the slides are a little difficult to read in some parts. Barring this, Learning Perl is an excellent video course and I would recommend this to any budding Perl programmer.

I can only hope that Randal Schwartz and O’reilly are working on videos for advanced programming in Perl. I look forward to them. If you are considering this course , please buy the author’s book as well. Here are links to the course and the book.

Video Course : http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920014430/

Book (5th edition available at the time of the course) : http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596520113

Book (6th edition june 2011) : http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920018452