| Title: | Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition. |
| Authors: | Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington |
| Publisher: | O'Reilly |
| Pages: | 964 |
| Reviewer: | Scott T. Hildreth |
| Synopsis: | |
| Table of Contents | 1. Strings; 2. Numbers; 3. Dates and Times; 4. Arrays; 5. Hashes; 6. Pattern Matching; 7. File Access; 8. File Contents; 9. Directories; 10. Subroutines; 11. References and Records; 12. Packages, Libraries, and Modules; 13. Classes, Objects and Ties; 14. Database Access; 15. Interactivit; 16. Process Management and Communication; 17. Sockets; 18. Internet Services; 19. CGI Programming; 20. Web Automation; 21. mod_perl; 22. XML; Index |
Let me start out by saying that I was very excited to review this book. At the same time I was a little overwhelmed. How much detail do I go into, the book is so packed full of information and examples. What can I write about a book that most the Perl community, if not all, considers a vaulable resource for Perl programmers. I decided I will just add my "2cents" to the stack of good reviews I have seen.
If you have the 1st Edition, buy the 2nd Edition. If you don't own a copy of the Perl Cookbook, buy one. This book is, as I stated earlier, packed full of valuable information and examples. The 2nd editon gives the reader all the problem/solutions of the 1st edition and much more. The 2nd edition has updated recipes as well as new ones, which use newer modules that have come into existence since the 1st edition was written. Html::Mason, Template Toolkit, and POE are just a few of the newer modules that are used in recipes. The 2nd edition of the Perl Cookbook also includes 2 new chapters. One chapter covers processing XML and the other new chapter covers mod_perl. As the "What's New in This Edition" section states, "The book you're holding is thicker than its previous edition of five years ago---about 200 pages thicker." These additonal pages aren't filler!
The Perl Cookbook 2nd edition is a must buy for the beginner to advance Perl programmer alike. If you have a problem, the Cookbook can give you a solution or at least point you in the right direction. Sometimes I like to just open the book to a random recipe and learn about a new module or see a different aproach to tackling a problem, TMTOWTDI. My only complaint is that there is not a chapter on using parsers/tokenizers, such as Parse::RecDescent and Parse::Yapp. Although that topic should be a book in itself. Yet, this does not prevent me from giving it a full set of stars or whatever the rating system may be.