Customer Reviews

Learning Perl on Win32 Systems

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a pretty weak introductory book. Don't' buy it with your own money (corporate funds are probably OK if the book is discounted more than 20% ;-). The authors definitely do not understand the Win32 environment well enough. The language is explained as an isolated phenomenon without reference to existing scripting tools (VBA, VBScrit, Rexx, etc.). The main use of Perl in Win32 environment is CGI progammining and here the book does not have enough value for beginners. Generally this book looks like an attempt to adapt the original Randal Schwartz book to the Win32 environment (second edition for UNIX also is not the best introductory book available, but at least it was one of the first books on Perl). The adaptation attempt failed and the results are pretty disappointing. Neither the examples, nor style are very suitable to Win32. For example "Standard Perl distribution" (page 6) contains recommendations like: nmake ( Build all of Perl) nmake Test (test your distribution) nmake install (Install to the target dir. In the Makefile) These recommendations can be considered a joke for Win32 beginners, who get used to prepackaged software. Chapters are very uneven in length and quality. The Chapter 1 is disappointing. The secret word guesser introduced in the Chapter 1 is definitely far from the best introductory example for Win32 audience. The number of unexplained concepts introduced here would scare novices. Probably more simple examples of a couple of UNIX-style filters (head, tail, and maybe unique) would be more appropriate. Chapter 2 is OK. Chapter 3 does not provide a clear description of Perl syntactical and semantical achievements and pitfalls. For example, Perl considers a negative subscript on the array as a count back from the end. So each element has two indexes (from the beginning and from the end). The last element has an index -1 that is very convenient. BTW Perl use the same approach in the substr built-in function. Chapter 4 seems to be written by "structured programming diehards" and is very weak. Rich Perl control structures are not covered. Neither continue, next, break operator (they really simplify construction of non-trivial loops), nor the short-circuit semantics of || && operators in if statements (not apparent for people who never programmed in C) was not discussed. Chapter 5 (hashes) is only 4 pages long for such an important subject as associative arrays. Strangely enough it does not mention the %ENV - probably the most important associative array for novices. Chapter 6 (Basic I/O) is very short. Perl after all was designed to process logs and such a chapter definitely should be more than four pages long and should contain more examples. Chapter 7 fails to recognize the different mentality of Win32 users. Basically there are two approaches to the regular expressions in Win32 environment. One is to use it only when necessary and the second is to use them whenever possible. The first camp (partially represented by former REXX users and VB users) prefer more procedural way of text manipulations and tend to rely more on substr, index, length, split and join functions in text manipulations, while the second is the regular expression addicts. The authors definitely belong to the second camp ;-). IMHO non-greedy (minimal) matching is often more convenient that a regular one, especially for novices, but it was never mentioned in the book. Chapter 15 is probably one of the few things that were done right in the book. The index and substr built-in functions are covered adequately. I would like to mention that the authors cover a very important use of the substr in the left part of the assignment function (the idea borrowed from the PL/1). Chapter 16 is just OK. Chapter 17 is a joke as DBM is the Unix-only beast. Only the last page ("Win32 Database interfaces") can be considered relevant for Win32 users. It's really depressing to see such a blunder in an O'Reilly book. Chapter about CGI is somewhat superficial. At the same time it is the main application area for Perl, especially in Win32 environment. The only subject covered in this book that was not covered in the "Cross Platform Perl" is the coverage of OLE2 (Chapter 19). It uses a rather interesting example of MAPI. Win32 is not UNIX. Strangely enough for such a book the discussion of pitfalls of Win32 environment is completely absent. For example the authors fail to stress the difference between chop and chomp function. Even the most annoying difference between UNIX-style and Win32 style directory paths syntax (with "\" instead of "/") was never mentioned. I believe O'Reilly should do better reviewing and editing job if it want to preserve its reputation of publisher of consistently well written and edited books. - Nikolai Bezroukov BASF Corp. Advanced Technology Group. Standard disclaimer applies.

This book is extremely difficult to rate because it has some major strengths and also some major weaknesses. I could pretty much give this book a rating anywhere between 1 and 5 stars and justify it. That being said, I have learned a lot of perl through reading the book & doing the excellent exercises that are provided (with answers), therefore it deserves a decent rating despite its faults.

The book is an overview of the language, not a reference. It's a tutorial that takes you through the major language features. Some of the chapters are regular expressions, filehandles, formats, hashes, functions, etc. The writing is generally clear and accessible and the examples are very well done. Most people should feel comfortable using perl after working through this book.

The real failing of the book is that it is pitched as a Win32 book but it is full of UNIX-centric examples and idioms. The chapter on DBM is likely to go unused by almost every Windows programmer and there is not much coverage of OLE automation/COM/ActiveX, which is key to Windows. The book would also have benefitted from a look at Windows system administration tasks and how to automate these with perl.

Another minor frustration is the "Topics We Didn't Mention" appendix. This book is only 220 pages + appendices, index, forewords and there could easily have been room for discussing those topics (like basic networking, security, the compiler).

In short, it's a good book to learn perl with if you're stuck using NT at work like me. That being said, the book is rough around the edges and could be polished significantly in a future edition.

I concur with the bulk of the reviews here: This is a shallow book, especially given Perl's scope. But it WILL help Windows folks understand many of the key Perl concepts that otherwise go unmentioned.

And that's the major point here. The book may be a trivial intro to Perl, but at least it doesn't assume you're a *NIX weenie. After getting annoyed reading the 3rd edition of the camel book, I bought this book. It was helpful in clearing up all those references to the weird stuff that *NIX dudes apparently are born knowning, and got me quickly into writing simple Perl scripts.

You want heavy details of the Win32 or NT-specific functions? Go read the POD embedded in those modules. Or get a different book.

This is "LEARNING Perl on Win32 Systems"... I read it in about 6 hours, total, cover to cover. And in that time it provided just about as good an intro as I could hope for.

Clear, concise and to the point examples back up a well thought through and sensibly paced book.

I liked the way that win32 issues were clearly dealt with - no'more trying to work out why your UNIX based examples dont work.

This book is excellent value for the $$ - you'll easily recoup in saved time the cover price.

Tom

If you do not use a Unix system, and are interested in Perl, this is the book you should go for. It provides an entertaining and thorough stroll through the language. There are a lot of little differences between this book and the other 'Learning Perl'. If you want to make special use of the Windows GUI, you should check this book out. Combined with the reference work 'Programming Perl', you will have everything you need to become proficient at the language. Highly recommended for both amateur and professional programmers.

I've had this book for 2 years, and have definitely gained from the purchase. While its module appendix is somewhat lacking, this book is a great guide for Windows people wanting to work with a Unix-native language like Perl. A must buy for Windows 95/98/NT users!

I bought this book as starter to learn more about Perl in general (and for Win32 systems). I found the very first chapters to be of good service, though I spotted these elementary Perl programming techniques in other O'Reilly books too. The Win32 part is in my opinion very poor, it doesn't explain things very well like OLE, reading/writing the Event log and other rudimentary system administration tasks. If you have a lot of free time on your hands like I sometimes tend to have, take some time to search for example scripts for Win32, and together with this book you will be able to understand. Though I think a new edition would be a good idea, covering specifically Win32 platform (people should buy other books to learn Perl in general, I do not like to see the same 3 chapters in every book over again).

This book doesn't have enough in depth coverage of PERL. For a programmer, this book is too simple, for a non-programmer, this book is too hard.

I know this book has been bashed by some of the Amazon reviewers. However, I think the book has a particular audience (no surprise by the title): new Perl developers who are not from a UNIX background. It succeeds for that audience.

I love the O'Reilly books on Perl, and this book is written by the most influential people in Perl (apart from Larry).

I come from a UNIX background, I still found this book helpful. In fact, I even bought the book for my brother-in-law, who wanted to learn Perl on Win32.

The Activestate Win32 Perl distribution was a baby at the time of the release - it would be nice if it could be updated, especially regarding Perl Package Manager. This is nitpicking, though.

To quote James Taylor, this book is "enough to be on your way". It gets the novice initiated into Perl and hungry for more. After that, there are some great O'Reilly titles (The Camel Book, the DBI book, the Sys Admin book) and Lincoln Stein titles (The CGI.pm book for web development, the socket book), as well as the Internet to move to.

I really love the O'Reilly Perl for Sys Admins book. It seems like I go back to that book and find something new each time.

I found that this book was good, particularly for the Win32 platform, and recommend it to anyone who uses Windows, regardless of their initial interest in programming. The only problems I had with the book are that the CGI (and OOP, which is introduced only in the context of CGI...but it could be so much more) chapter is left in limbo as far as being able to use any of the examples. If it were used on a Unix webserver (which are almost always setup to handle Perl CGI scripts), the examples would work fine. However, this is Perl for Win32, so IIS or PWS (if possible...I don't think it is, however) should be the web platforms targetted, and a "quick and dirty" setup instruction would be good to be able to test those examples.