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Wednesday, 17 August 2005

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Books : Perl Cookbook

Rating:

- Doesn't encourage good Perl practice
The biggest problem with this book is that none of the examples work when using the warnings flag and the "strict" pragma... if you leave these out when writing Perl, you can very quickly tie yourself in knots trying to work out why your variables are colliding with each other. So, you can either take the lazy approach and leave out warnings and strict (and pay the cost later when you're dealing with a few hundred lines of code), or you can battle away trying to turn their examples into good Perl code that works.

The other problem with this book is... well, the fact that it's a book. This kind of example-heavy manual lends itself far better to an online format, from which example code can be copied & pasted.

Those gripes aside, this is a manual I come back to again and again (although I invested in the CD-based Perl Bookshelf from O'Reilly, which includes this book). The format is excellent, the index is a little weak, but it's generally easy to find what you're looking for. The examples are well explained and I particularly like the way in which multiple solutions are presented for each problem, reflecting the very essence of Perl.

This book is not for beginners though (hint: read the top line of the front cover); for that I recommend you read "Learning Perl" or, better still, get yourself on a beginner course.

Rating:

- Perl Cookbook
This book is an essential collection of code snippets that can be used as a guide when coding applications. In my opinion this book along with Learning Perl are the 2 essential books to have on your desk if you are doing serious stuff with perl

Rating:

- Evergreen classic
Once you've learnt the syntax of a language, you want to learn the idioms, and how it's used most effectively. And given Perl's famous 'There's More The One Way To Do It' motto, you'll need all the help you can get. Perl Cookbook is that help.

Neither a reference nor a tutorial, if you've ever read another cookbook, you'll know what to expect -- after all, this is the daddy of them all. Themed chapters, consisting of short tasks that most people will find handy e.g. trimming white space from a string, or populating a hash. What makes Perl Cookbook so valuable is not just finding out how to do it, but finding out what the most efficient and idiomatic way to do it is. This is where you'll see the Perl way of doing things in action, and it's an immensely valuable learning experience, even if you never need to do exactly any of the things in the book.

For me, the most vital material is the earliest stuff, which takes you through how to use the string, array and hash, the guts of any Perl program. The final half of the book explores Perl's libraries for the use of databases, and a lot of network and web-related stuff, from simple socket programming, to CGI, and the use of mod_perl.

This is a cornucopia of Perl lore, firmly established in the Perl Canon, and deservedly so. You want it on your bookshelf if you want to really call yourself a Perl programmer.

Rating:

- Not what I had in mind
Being a Perl beginner, this book is too hard for me, things I knew and learned I found out on the net.

This Book is maybe a must have for people who's work is writing perl applications all day... For me, writing little programs to process text, this book is too hard...

You also need to have unix/linux background.

Maybe I should have bought a beginners book, but I saw the 5 stars and read some reviews the book was very good...

I only recommend this book to advaced programmers.

Rating:

- Buy it ...
The summary line says it all - if you're a Perl programmer, you should buy this book irrespective of whether you're a beginner or an `old hand'.

One of the best (and worst) things about Perl is the fact that 'There's More Than One Way To Do It', and the Cookbook contains a number of useful recipes for a variety of different tasks ranging from simple things like opening files up to data parsers. A downside of this is that just when you think you know the language, the authors come up with another way to do something! The book focuses, rightly, on `everyday' programming applications and as a result the treatment of CGI and databases is lacking but, having said that, perfectly good books are available on both subjects.

Along with O'Reilly's other Perl books, the Cookbook has taken up permanent residence on my desk - the book is *that* good. If you're just getting into Perl programming, you'll learn an awful lot by using the Camel Book in conjunction with the Cookbook.

There are lots of poor computing books out there, but the Cookbook stands head and shoulders above practically everything, but then would you expect anything less from two authors who are pillars of the Perl community?

Just go out and buy it!