[briandfoy]

And, the latest edition of Learning Perl covers up to v5.34. I also provide additional exercises in Learning Perl Exercises (<https://leanpub.com/learning_perl_exercises>), and cover new features in Perl New Features (<https://leanpub.com/perl_new_features>) so I can update it faster than the paper books.

But yet, Randal had beat into me the idea of explaining "why" on everything. You'll notice the basic pattern in Learning Perl and my other writing is that we show the expedient thing, tell you how that fails, improve that a little, show how that fails, and end up at a better final solution. That path shows quite a bit that's ancillary to the task at hand, but also shows how the pieces work together and how different parts affect the solution. I'm usually frustrated by other language tutorials where they say "just do this" without saying anything about why the various parts are there.

Learning Perl was originally written with a C programmer audience, so it assumes that the reader is comfortable with ideas such as variables and looping. I have another book I might recommend for beginning to code: Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots. Sure, it's Smalltalk and literally written for teenagers, but I think it works. It reminds me of the fun days of Logo.