(Part 2) Top products from r/perl

Modern Perl is good, but I sometimes recommend the Perl Cookbook to beginners, because its format is a little easier for new people to get started with. In general these days, Modern Perl may be the best up to date guide, with good advice on how Perl should be used, but I'm not convinced it is the easiest to learn from for a beginner, especially in cases where they are already somewhat familiar but just trying to figure out how to get things done.

Perl Cookbook:
http://www.amazon.com/Perl-Cookbook-Second-Edition-Christiansen/dp/0596003137/

Yeah, it hasn't been updated since 2003, but it is a really well done cookbook-style book, where each chapter has an introduction to the topic at hand, followed by "recipes" on how to do all the common types of things.

Which is better for you might be personal preference, so here are some links to help you decide which one would be more useful for your style:

Modern Perl Online Edition:
http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2014/

Perl Cookbook (older first edition):
http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl/cookbook/


Also, Perl has fantastic documentation. Use perldoc to access it. For example:

• Show the main page for documentation. This provides an index of other special pages on various topics. Most of them are well written and have good examples and tutorials.
  > perldoc perl
  
  
• Show the docs for a module
  > perldoc Module::Blah
  
  
• Show the docs for a function
  > perldoc -f function
  

Okay
[2007] (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Medicine-Biology-Biomedical-Informatics/dp/076374333X)

[2013] (https://books.google.com/books?id=aXIWBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=perl+informatics+cancer&source=bl&ots=njOisuCGns&sig=IPTvuIEgz-noGhdg3pwzC66MQxM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-9qQVIOLEdbqoASEz4CwAw&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=perl%20informatics%20cancer&f=false)

both rely on info from the HGP

All of the information from the HGP was used to create [NCBI] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Biotechnology_Information), which is powered by perl. More specifically the BLAST tool was first written in perl.

Also, there are a lot of tools for proteomic analysis by mass spec using perl.

And then of course all the software companies using perl/hadoop for big data projects

another good one (especially for bioinformatics): http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Perl-Bioinformatics-James-Tisdall/dp/0596000804/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369804508&sr=1-1&keywords=perl+bioinformatics

> I purchased 3 books - Perl for Beginners, Perl by example, Learning Perl (6th edition)

I can't find a book called Perl for Beginners. If you mean Beginning Perl then that's a highly recommended book.

Learning Perl is also very good.

The two books above are written by acknowledged Perl experts.

Perl By Example appears to be written by someone who knows very little about Perl. I really can't recommend it. Sorry you wasted your money.