Customer Reviews

Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am using Mason for about a year. Then I saw the Mason book. My first tought was: "Why should I buy a book about Mason - The online documentation is excellent...?".

But even the introduction chapters of this book gives you new ideas how to get things done. Starting with the second half of chapter 4 every Masonsite developer should take a close look. He will find a in deep discussion about every Mason feature - and more (e.g. The Bricolage-CMS-Appendix).

I my opinion there is no discussion "to buy or not to buy" this book. The only question is "when".

On the one hand this book can be a bit boring for "new" Mason user and as mentioned before the online documentation is very good. On the other hand if you have your first mason-site done and read this book you will have very likely the urgent desire to rewrite some code.

But this is a common perl problem: "There are many ways to get things done."

I dislike the "Example" chapter. One of the big advantages of Mason is the possibility to seperate perl-code and HTML. This ist not very well done within the example-site.

Conclusion: This book is not needed to get in touch with Mason althought usefull - but if you are really starting to deploy a site I strongly recommend this book.

As a longtime mason user (2 years, private and commercial use) I didn't have to think about buying this book. Dave Rolsky and Ken Williams, both core developers, introduce you to the concepts behind HTML::Mason and its many features which really make the life of a web developer way easier.... Even if you're already familiar with mason this book will serve you as an excellent reference. If you haven't heard of mason yet and you're into web development and Perl is your language of choice you should also definitely have a look at this book and mason in general.

From the standpoint of a person who knows Perl and Apache pretty well, I have to say this book is all I needed to get going with HTML::Mason. There are excellent online docs for Mason, there are places Mason fits better (and worse), and there are viable alternatives to Mason. This book covers that ground right off the bat, and I like that.

I was able to configure a couple servers, write up some test components, throw together some quick admin tools, and remake a custom database web app in a very short time using Mason and this book. It may not be for you if you are new to Perl or Apache, but I think Amazon has a wide selection of books available on both of these topics. Buy 'em, read 'em, then get this one.

I highly recommend it.

But.. it is a little too short. Not really but I would have loved to have more book. The book covers just about every topic. I personally would have enjoyed to have more examples in each area. They made sure that there is at least on example for each topic. They even give some information about other competing products and about products that use Mason as it's base (for example Bircolage - I think I spelled that correctly). I am really glad the book to come out, it is a perfect addition to my collection of O'Reilly and Perl books.

Thanks for a great book!

Apart from being clear and well-written, this book is also the sum of all the knowledge of the Mason community, written by two of the developers of Mason themselves.
If you already use Mason, it's a must have.
If you are new to Mason, try it first (it isn't difficult at all), then read the book.
From my point of view this is an excellent technical book.

Far from being just a reference, this book explains the conceptual framework behind Mason. The main idea of which is creating reusable components or building blocks to generate each element of your web site. This simple but powerful idiom is extremely useful in creating both small and very large dynamic web sites.

The book is aimed at intermediate to advanced Perl programmers, although a bright beginner could pick the material up with a little help from the Mason community's very helpful mailing list. This book is not a tutorial. Instead, the authors devote a long chapter (chapter 8) to the analysis of a fully functional web app with full source code. I preferred this approach however because it helped me focus on the application as a whole rather than silly pedantic examples that lack context.

Before reading this book, I had some experience working on a site that used a "home-brewed" templating system, but all the while I knew there had to be a better way. After reading through the first four chapters, I was able to build a rather sophisticated site and have been quite pleased with both Mason and this book. I fully recommend it.

I've worked on enough PHP and other lousy web code to have cringed when I read the title of this book: Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason. "No!" I cried, "don't cross the streams!" By the end of the book, I was feeling much more at ease (but I still cringe a little at that title).Mason is (though it seems debated) a cross between a lightweight application server and a very lightweight templating system. Requests go into Mason, which dispatches them to handlers and produces a response. The handlers and dispatch are simple but powerful: they use ideas object-oriented programming and allow the programmer to easily abstract and reuse code parts.

It seems like a very powerful system, but its programmer-facing interface is fairly simple. The book walked through all the basic Mason concepts (request, autohandlers, dhandlers, components, methods, etc.) quickly, but with sufficient explanation and demonstration to make everything clear. Chapter 8 walked through the construction of a web and database application, using all the major features covered so far. The features had already been so clearly explained that I felt comfortable just skimming through the chapter.

After that, the book began to cover some more esoteric concepts. Mason is made up of a number of classes: an interpreter, a lexer, a compiler, and a resolver. A programmer can write his own class to implement any of these components, changing the system to suit his whims.At the end of all this, I felt like I could really make Mason do a lot of cool things, and that it was a nice-sized solution for a lot of problems. (I still don't see myself actually /using/ Mason for anything, but now I know it's not so bad, and I know how to use it.) The book was well-written, had the right amount of depth, and was the right length for end-to-end reading. I'm glad I read it.

This is a good book. I had no idea about mason but helped me get right up to speed. Recommended for anyone who wants to get their foot in the door to learn mason.

I have read the book and I found it to be very disappointing. The main reason is that it addresses itself at a very small crowd, a crowd that already knows mod_perl and already has done some Mason development. This crowd might and probably will appreciate this book. I do not believe a lot of other people, eg. the intermediate Perl programmer with some CGI.pm knowledge, will benefit from it.

Didactically there is also something wrong with it. It is not hands-on enough. The first 7 chapters are pretty theoretical (academic) and not illustrated enough with examples. The 8th chapter is a practical example, an existing web application. Unfortunately the chapter is too big (60 pages), not very illustrative I find and further ruined by the fact that the authors are using one of their own CPAN modules called Alzabo all over the place. I have nothing against this module, I don't even know it but from a didactic point of view it is a mistake to use a module that is not very well known. Their is also a lack of screenshots or decent figures in the book. The authors do not seem to put graphical or visual presentation very high on their priority list.

This is the first book about Mason and on top of that written by two members of the development team. It should have been strong enough to convince people that Mason is a better approach than CGI.pm, that Mason is as good a templating solution as PHP or Zope. It should make you want to use Mason and forget about these other solutions. Unfortunately I do not believe it will convince anybody outside of the circle of the already converted.

I suppose Dave thinks that this is a fairly advanced topic so he can speak in advanced ways (that unfortunately are of no help).
I am not un-intelligent yet after trying several hours i cannot grasp the concept of passing values from html forms, to my mason program.
Parameters in http requests dont have dollar signs in them dave do they?

Put it simply dave would be my advice to you, this book is painful to read as its explained to me as though i was a computer.