I've been looking on-line for some programming books and found some pretty cheap ones. The thing is most of them are from 1995-2000. I'm not familiar with either language...Perl or C. Has the language changed much from 95-04? That's almost ten years and technology is always on the run. I don't want to buy books that are going to lead me in the wrong direction. Also, do you guys or girls have any recommendations on some programming books for a newbie?

I don't know about Perl (to me it looks Russian) but C is a standard, so you should be able to use old books (I learned it with the help of a book copyrighted in 1985 called "C made easy")

You properly want to read the "GNU Coding standards" on the GNU Website too - even if you don't plan to code for them. You will get good tips on how to write good codes.

The C standard most widely implemented by compilers today was first written in 1989, so you should be OK there. Note though that ANSI/ISO standardized C is a very general language and library specification. A lot of functionality is added by additions to the language. On Linux (and other Unixes), a lot of these additions implement what is known as the POSIX specification. These functions don't really change a lot either. What does change are a lot of platform specific functions which get added or removed as time goes on. But for just learning basic C, you should probably stick to the ANSI/ISO standardized stuff at first and in that case your books are probably fine (depends on the exact titles, there have been a lot of bad C books written).

As for Perl, the language has changed since 1995 (I think that's back in the Perl 4 days), but the changes are mostly backwards compatible. You probably should glance over the Perl man pages and the perldoc documentation to get a sense of what's changed.

If you like to learn-by-example, in the case of Perl there are a lot of freely available CGI scripts written in Perl -- just do a google search for 'perl cgi script'

These scripts are usually relatively simple -- I've learned a lot from them

Cheers,
nukkel