Title: Makes learning this bizarre language even more difficult
Product review: I'm one of the people who doesn't "get" perl. I don't understand the need, the hype or the reason for the inscrutable code. True, the infamous Chapter One is bad enough, as is the lame humor and ego-driven silliness of these sample programs. But I'm skeptical enough (even of my own skepticism) to keep an open mind on these matters. What I was left wondering as I read through this is, why do we need to go through this? What is it that we can't provision with existing tools? What is beneficial about having many ways to do simple things, which only leads to more confusion? Perl code is not easy to read, easy to maintain, nor easy to learn. It all looks a like a regular expression that ate too much spaghetti. Give me a carefully structured language like C, C++ or Java any day. For Unix needs, Bash shell scripts, sed and awk are just fine. Perl is a mess, and this book doesn't make it any clearer.
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