Wicked Cool Books
shoemoney
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2 min read
People are always asking me to recommend books to learn programing. While I can understand many languages I mostly hack around. I hardly ever write a program from scratch unless it is a bash shell script and some people would consider that hacking around by itself =P.
Anyway one book series that I have always picked up a ton from is the Wicked Cool series. I own them all.
Wicked Cool Shell Scripts by Dave Taylor (Elite Retreat Alumni) was the first book in the series I picked up. I got it in 2004 and its still one of my most referenced books. There are great examples on user management, web scraping, and just tons of stuff. This book is for anyone who has a decent understanding with command line access UNIX machines. Its perfect for MacOSX users who want to learn how to harness some of the power outside of the GUI.
Wicked Cool Perl Scripts is another great reference in the series. Perl is such an amazingly powerful language and for me was pretty easy to pickup. Perl is a great cross between shell scripting and PHP. It has all the hack and slash of a shell scripting language but a lot of the same syntax as PHP. This book has a ton of great "cookbook" style scripts that really help you think of some evil cool little scripts. Some of the stuff Dave has whipped up on perl has really boggled my mind. Another great book in the series.
Wicked Cool PHP Scripts is by far my favorite in the series. I absolutely love PHP as both a command line and web programming language and being it is such a forgiving language its really perfect for me. This book is perfect for the web programmer looking for some new ideas. It covers everything from advanced email stuff to file handling to security and even more. Each chapter also has a "what can go wrong" to tip you off to possible security issues or debugging. Its very well written and has a ton of very useful example code.
So if you are like me and learn by diving in and altering others code a bit these are the books for you.
Wicked Cool Shell Scripts by Dave Taylor (Elite Retreat Alumni) was the first book in the series I picked up. I got it in 2004 and its still one of my most referenced books. There are great examples on user management, web scraping, and just tons of stuff. This book is for anyone who has a decent understanding with command line access UNIX machines. Its perfect for MacOSX users who want to learn how to harness some of the power outside of the GUI.
Wicked Cool Perl Scripts is another great reference in the series. Perl is such an amazingly powerful language and for me was pretty easy to pickup. Perl is a great cross between shell scripting and PHP. It has all the hack and slash of a shell scripting language but a lot of the same syntax as PHP. This book has a ton of great "cookbook" style scripts that really help you think of some Wicked Cool PHP Scripts is by far my favorite in the series. I absolutely love PHP as both a command line and web programming language and being it is such a forgiving language its really perfect for me. This book is perfect for the web programmer looking for some new ideas. It covers everything from advanced email stuff to file handling to security and even more. Each chapter also has a "what can go wrong" to tip you off to possible security issues or debugging. Its very well written and has a ton of very useful example code.
So if you are like me and learn by diving in and altering others code a bit these are the books for you.