I've got the Dutch translation (Perl5 in 24 uur - Kit voor beginners, published by Academic Service in The Netherlands) between my other Perl books for years now. I'm reading it now, together with Learning Perl, Programming Perl, Beginning with Perl and Picking Up Perl (I like it when things get explained in more than one way, with different examples).

I think the English version is an excellent book. It handles a lot of parts of Perl, it is serious enough, it gets to the point quickly, it leaves out several difficult things in the beginning and gets to them later on carefully and the explanation is often the best and mot patient I've seen sofar.

But the Dutch translators often made a mess of it, too often. Sometimes things are translated that shouldn't be, like references ("verwijzingen") or regular expressions ("vaste uitdrukkingen"). Too often variable names are translated in Dutch in the text and are forgotten in the example text box (Employee = Werknemer, File = Bestand, Sticks = Stokken, Stones = Stenen).

Really annoying is when it is not clear whether the writer made a stupid mistake, or whether it was the printer or the translator. Parentheses, braces, brackets, commas, semicolons, percent signs: often forgotten, or too many of them, or the wrong type. Or a % or @ instead of a $, or the other way around. Different variable names in the examples than the one in the explanatory texts. Results from examples are the results from the English examples (like the length of a string) and not of the Dutch translated example. And so on and so on.

This book is starting to have more red and blue pencil comments in it than black print.

Anyway, with the other books next to this one, it helps me a lot in learning Perl. Trying to find the right translation helps as well... (but that was not intended by the publisher, I hope).

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