Matthew's Journal

Haven't programmed in Perl for a couple of years since switching to Python, but...

use strict; - means you can't implicitly declare variables which traps a lot of typos and scope problems. I never bothered with the -w flag which always seemed to me to generate too many warnings to which the response was "yes, I know I'm doing that".

I like Nigel Chapman's "Perl: The Programmer's Companion", which assumes you know how to program already and just need to get up to speed with a new language (but also deals with some of the advanced features that "get going quickly" books tend to skip over, if I remember correctly). Seems to be out of print, but there are reasonably-priced new and second hand copies on Amazon marketplace.