Re: (OT) I prefer to do my learning with: dead trees or flying electrons?

How much fundamental of the Camel was really obsoleted by 5.6.* or 5.8.*?

Well, first of all, the Camel isn't a book about fundamentals, it's a reference guide. I'd say, the camel is as obsoleted in three years, as a book about important CPAN modules does in three years. How many fundamental modules arrived on CPAN the last three years?

Declaring variables is still the same. Looping and conditionals are the same. Declaring subroutines is the same, with at best a few attributes being added, if anything. Builtins are pretty much the same, with a few details being different. Complex datastructures, packages/modules, and OO programming are the same

None of that has changed much since 5.000, and many fundamental things haven't changed since perl4, or even earlier Perls. If you look at fundamentals, even the pink Camel still isn't obsolete. Some important things that have changed from 5.6.* to 5.8.*, and are either missing from the Camel, or insufficiently documented: Unicode support, threading support, Perl I/O layers, signals, and a whole bunch of new modules.

Look, it's fine if you don't want to call the Camel outdated. But then, be consistent, and don't call other (hypothetic) books outdated either.

Abigail

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Re: Re: (OT) I prefer to do my learning with: dead trees or flying electrons?
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 23, 2003 at 18:21 UTC

I'd say, the camel is as obsoleted in three years, as a book about important CPAN modules does in three years. How many fundamental modules arrived on CPAN the last three years?

Not to troll but what kind of logical argument is that? It's tantamount to saying the camel is obsolete because the price of crude oil has gone up. Backing it up by saying "11 million barrels of oil are imported into the U.S. per day!" doesn't really help the argument either.

You also seem fairly competent at Perl programming, if the camel is so out of date (and has such poor indicies, if that's really an important point) why not write one yourself?

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