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| DistroWatch + TuxReports | November 7, 2002 | |
by Steven Holzner, Coriolis
ISBN 1-58880-193-4
The first thing that grabs you about this book, is its size. It's massive. A quick look at the mammoth Table of Contents, and you'll understand why. To top it off the author informs you he couldn't fit everything into the book, and that three chapters had to be put on the accompanying CD.
Ok, so there's over eight-hundred sections to this book which takes care of quantity, but what of quality? Well, put simply, the quality is just as evident and abundant as the quantity.
The book takes you relatively slowly through the process of learning Perl, from beginning to end.
The author does have a tendency to repeat himself but then that does serve to reiterate the vast array of commands and syntax at your disposal.
Impressed upon me, is the author's, "Not wanting to be taken too seriously," approach. Throughout the book he opens sections with things like:
The big boss is in a good mood. "I've just fired Smith and Jones," the BB says, "Delete their entries in the %employess hash at once." "How do I do that?" you ask. The BB scowls and asks, "Am I going to have to fire you too?"
The big boss is on the phone again. "I've just acquired BigBigDataCo," the BB says gleefully. "The folks there are sending over a hash of employee records. Merge that into our %employees hash immediately." "Okay," you say, hanging up the phone. "So, how do I merge hashes?"
It certainly does serve to make the arduous task of learning a programming language more entertaining, serving both to hold your interest, and highlight real-world uses for each sub-topic being introduced.
It's also nice to see the book covers the latest stable version of Perl at the time of writing, 5.6.1.
The author also correctly recognises Perl for the cross-platform language it has been for some time, and has designed the book to cater as much for the Microsoft Windows users as Unix, without provoking the reader to skip large chunks of the book. Something many computing books suffer from.
The book doesn't stop with teaching you Perl. After that it's on to a substantial section on CGI with tons of example code, followed by XML, SAX, SOAP and WML handling. There's even a healthy dose of Tk to keep you going.
All in all I have to give this book the thumbs up. It's not the authority Programming Perl, 3rd edition is. But then what book is? It's also not as heavy going as Programming Perl which is out of bounds to most beginners. Instead it takes a slow, entertaining approach to teaching the novice Perl programmer the ropes, and will certainly learn the intermediate a thing or three. For all but the Perl Gods, I recommend this book. My copy has now taken pride and place alongside the fiercesome Camel as a worthy reference source.
85%
(Had the extra three chapters on the accompanying CD, that also holds all the source code from the book, been in PDF format rather than the more restrictive eBook format I would have awarded it an extra two percent.)
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