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Adults, friends of mine amongst them, have read the book for themsleves (as opposed to reading it aloud to their offspring) and while I decided I wouldn't be seen reading it on a train, I would do so in the evenings.
It's very readable. Rowling manages the difficult balance between readability pitched at a young age and a fairly complex plot. My own love of literature was nurtured on Enid Blyton's Famous Five books, the style and grammatical content of which are execrable. I found this to my cost when trying to read them aloud to my children many years ago and began to realize why many libraries in the UK had banned her from their lists. Rowling's construction, on the other hand, is excellent and reads well aloud. I understand that her later novels in the series are even better, interweaving more complexity for 'older' appeal into the work. This may well encourage me to borrow the next novel from my long-suffering nephew.
Rowling also doesn't fall into the trap of dishing up cheesy humour for the youngsters but opts rather more for a nascent dry humour which is more stylish and may well prepare youngsters for a more advanced appreciation of humorous literature.
The characters are reasonably three-dimensional for a children's novel, and the story-line holds up well for the most part. Her inventiveness in the paraphernalia of the magic world, and in particular the game of Quidditch is particularly to be commended. There is even a moral message in this novel, one of not judging too hastily who is one's friend and who is one's enemy, an excellent topic for human cubs developing interpersonal skills without guidance.
The content is, however, very British (I almost said English but she's Welsh) and I can see where some references might need explanation to American readers, but this will not detract from the novel's enjoyability.
In summary, then, an excellent read for 9 to 13 year-olds, an amusing read for adults and pleasantly engaging to read aloud to young family members.
A hit.
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I read the first edition of the book, which was about 200 pages, or something in that range, which filled my mind with nothing but questions. Current edition, however, could answer to all of those questions (well, almost). Of course, to make it answer them I had to re-read the book four times. But none of the books I currently own (and I own quite a few) could've taken me to the innards of the language so deep no matter how many times I had read them. So the book is of value.
The Camel book, especially, does a great job on Regular Expressions and pattern matching. If you want to learn RegEx of perl in very details, you definitely need listen to the author of Perl. "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl is also a good choise, but doesn't include the latest updates.
Formats aren't covered very well though. So you might consider "The Lama book" for that ("Learning Perl"). Still, none of the books can tell you about the innards of the Perl in so much detail overall than "Programming Perl".
OOP is also toched upon in the book. Since purpose of the author is not to preach you OO lingo (but plain Perl), you'll treat that part just as an intorduction to OOP and consider "Object Oriented perl" by Damian Convey as the next text book.
I found chpater 14, "Tied variables" very helpfull though. It might remind you of DBM/Berkley DB, through the syntax
tie my %db, 'AnyDBM_File', 'my_file', O_CREAT|O_RDWR, 0664;
but unfortunately it's not about DBM at all. It is about how the "tie" function works, and teaches you how to create your own classes for implementing with "tie". After that chapter, I even had to update some of my classes and saved lots of time for their updates.
"Compiling", chapter 18 ,is a must read chapter for those who "live & breath" with Perl (like me, may be ?).
I don't want you to buy the book unless you have a good understanding of Programming or/and have knowledge of some programming languages. Otherwise, it won't help at all.
If your purpose is just to get started with Web applications, go for "CGI progamming 101" by Jacqueline Hamilton. It is a good start. But if you want to go even deeper, "Learning Perl" and "Perl Coookbook" is the next choise. Keep the "The Camel" book as the next (but definitely, not the last).
Plus, the authors inject just enough light humor to make your programming project bearable. :) If I didn't find my current copy so helpful already, I'd buy a newer edition.
First, it is about the language in general, not just about CGI programming. It has an excellent little introduction to the CGI:: module, but of course it also introduces you to hundreds of other useful CPAN modules.
Second, it isn't a "for dummies" book. You have to understand programs and files and loops. That said, it doesn't fall into the trap of teaching you how to translate C to Perl - it shows you the "easy" way of doing things (via hashes, OO, grep and map, etc.) without getting too caught up in the things that make other programming languages such an amazing sink of time.
Third, it teaches the idioms of Perl programming. Follow the idioms, and you'll generate readable and maintainable code.
It's not the only Perl book I own - I can also recommend Christiansen's _Perl Cookbook_ and Conway's _Object-Oriented Perl_ - but it is far and away the one I refer to the most.
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This book is an excellent case study for anyone with an interest in the evolutionary economics perspective on technological innovation.
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Fischer has provided the researcher in Texas Navy history with many little known but important facts not likely to be found in other published books. It is also very readable by both researcher and lay reader, written in an elegantly simple yet factual style.
I would rate this book with four and a half stars if it were possible. This book is a must-have for anyone researching the Texas Navy, or just looking for an interesting read on what life and politics were like in early Texas.