RE: Perl texts for college class?

I don't know about a "better" textbook for getting students up and running
in Perl.  A good *followup* would be Sriram Srinivasan's "Advanced Perl
Programming", also from O'Reilly.  Covers the subjects you're specifically
interested in, along with others.  Here's a link to a detailed table of
contents:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/advperl/toc.html

I think it's one of the most useful programming books I've ever purchased;
covered exactly what I *didn't* understand about Perl in a very clear way.
Highly recommended.  (With the following caveat: make sure students also
download the errata file from
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/advperl/errata/).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: William R Ward [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Friday, October 29, 1999 3:20 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Perl texts for college class?
> 
> 
> 
> I teach Programming in Perl at De Anza College, in Cupertino
> California.  We have a problem which is that there don't seem to be
> any good textbooks for a college type of class.
> 
> The "llama" book (_Learning Perl_) is just not good enough - after
> about halfway through the quarter we run out of topics in it, and it
> doesn't address key Perl concepts like references, modules, and object
> oriented programming in Perl.  In my opinion, when they made the 2nd
> Edition for Perl 5, they didn't rewrite it deeply enough.  I suspect
> that it is well suited for a corporate training class, which is after
> all what Randal does, where you are there 8 hours a day for 5 days.
> But for a college class with homework and exams that meets two or
> three nights a week for a couple of months, it just isn't suitable.
> 
> So if anyone out there knows of a better textbook I'd really like to
> hear about it...
> 
> --Bill.
> 
> -- 
> William R Ward        [email protected]      
> http://www.bayview.com/~hermit/
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------------
> The secret of being creative is making something that's not very new
> but just a little bit different in the right direction - Marvin Minsky
>