[mapgrep]

I really enjoyed O'Reilly's compact "Up and Running with Rails," which I bought because I could never remember the basics after two reads through the default (monster) rails book, "Agile Web Development with Rails."

Sadly, O'Reilly appears to have lost interest in this series; the Rails book dates to 2006 and is too far behind now to recommend. Look no farther than the #2 rated Amazon review ("28 of 29 people found the following review helpful") to find out why: "Given that this book is only 127 pages long without the Appendix, it's a pretty pricey little item.... a $29.99 retail price seems exorbitant... this little book would make a great introduction to a more comprehensive book on Rails. Stand-alone, it feels like a rip-off."

I was also going to recommend "Effective Perl Programming" -- but now I see that the second edition has been bulked up to 500 pages from the original ~200. Ugh.

[jleader]

"Modern Perl".

Well written, covers pretty much everything you should use, good, clear examples.

Available free online: http://onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/

[markkanof]

Yes, that attitude seems fairly prevalent. I read a lot of Amazon reviews suggesting the same idea, that you should basically be paying by the number of pages. What that fails to acknowledge is that distilling ideas down to just the important parts is hard work. It's possible that a short book doesn't cover the topic very well, but I think it's more likely that the author has worked really hard to express their ideas in the fewest number of pages possible.

Lately I have decided that I won't even buy computer books that are more than ~300 pages, and I would prefer if they were more in the 100 to 200 page range. I'll take a short, concise, highly target book over a thousand page monster any day. And I'm more than willing to pay "full price" for the short book.