I started with two O'Reilly reference booklet things, one on general Perl and the other was for mod_perl, which was what I was hired to learn and write as my first job.

I took a break from Perl (went to college). When I got back into the workplace, I went with perldoc.perl.org pretty much as a reference guide. I had access to O'Reilly's CD bookshelf but the nuggets of useful information were too few to bother. The cookbooks were good to browse through to see other ways of doing common tasks like parsing text but in the end perldoc.perl.org is where I only go to these days.

I've always benefitted the most when learning things but simply looking at examples instead of droning proofs or explanations which is why I believe I prefer the brevity of reference guides over big books.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.