Customer Reviews

Essential Perl 5 for Web Professionals

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Excellent book for learning web-based PERL applications. The examples were concisely and fairly well explained. The appendix does a good job of elaborating in more detail. You probably will not like this book if you do not have a programming background. Also, you'll need a good PERL reference book as a companion. The book does not come with a CD ROM, so you'll have to type out the examples.

This is an OK beginner book on CGI and Perl, but why in the world did they title it "Perl 5 for..."? I'm proficient in Perl 4 and I assumed that this book would tell me all about working with objects and all the other new stuff in version 5. Seemed like a reasonable assumption based on the title. However, the only place that Perl 5 is even mentioned is on the cover!! As a general introduction to Perl and CGI, a much better book is "Visual Quickstart Guide to Perl and CGI" by Elizabeth Castro.

If you are interested in learning perl for web cgi functions this book rocks. Its the only one I have run into that gives examples of code and explains it line by line, in layman! The only reason I am giving it 4 stars is because I could have used a few more examples. The book is toooo short. I warn potental readers that this book does not go into great detail about the perl language itself (which is useful for much more than web CGI) but if you don't care about that and want to dive into making forms and interactive web pages you have to buy this book now!

I was recommended this book by a friend and I found perl alot easier to use than I first thought. Fun examples and the author took the time to answer a question I had. Definetly recommend!

Some of the strategies the author suggests are interesting. I was a beginner when I got this book, but I don't think I'll ever write PERL like this though. Seems like they could have published this book in a HTML book as an appendix...really more useful for folks who want to stick to HTML.

I like the approach the writters took and made the projects easy to learn

I frustrated myself for half a year searching for information on CGI. There simply is nothing online and nothing else in print that will teach you Perl if you are not already a fairly seasoned programmer. This book made it simple and plain, rather than garbled and hard to follow. It leads you through many examples - they're great because they are common, real-world scripts. The cover price is a bit shocking for such a small book, but it is absolutely worth it. The books I bought before, all more expensive and larger, are only helpful to me now that I have read through this book. Some of them are still impossible to read because the authors just don't know how to write. The authors of this book are experts at explaining new concepts.

I do not usually do reviews but after reading this book I just to make others aware. I am honestly at a loss as to what happended... Writing a book is HARD, so while my words may sound harsh, I do appreciate the problems faced and just maybe the publisher has some responsibility here too. This book dives in too fast for beginners without explaining little, but very important bits that would aid greatly in achieving a solid groundwork. However, what's just as frustrating is that it does not go into ANY detail for more experienced Perl authors. Concepts appear and quickly vanish without trace. Examples are NOT explained fully and in a few cases at all. Further, forget it if you want to run Perl on a Windows platform. There's a slight mention of it only. Like other reviews here, the appendix (50+ pages in a 150 page book) is too long, too simple, and what REALLY angers me is that it's just a rehash from the book body. Mostly, word-for-word! The authors say it's REAL WORLD? Sorry, that's just plain incorrect - and they know it (at least I really hope they do?). This book starts out with good intentions but falls in a screaming heap too soon. And the price? Just more of a reason to look elsewhere.

I liked the book, and if you go to the website, you can download all the code for the examples.

Most 'beginning' programming books are written by very experienced programmers who are often out of touch with how much the newbie does not know.
Too often, certain key bits of knowledge are assumed and I found that too often, my mind was about ready to explode from frustration.
I admit that I just didn't get it, whatever 'it' was.
Then I found this book. It is extremely simple, but that is what I needed to get off the ground. Just as I learned to read from books by Dr. Seuss, I learned to program from reading this book -- it got me off the ground.
Just remember that finishing this book does not make you a programmer -- its code examples are very simplified and full of security holes. On the other hand, this book will fill in the concepts that other books miss and you will finally be ready to take on the more complex books that WILL make you a programmer.