Customer Reviews

Minimal Perl: For UNIX and Linux People

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Minimal Perl concerns itself with Perl one liners and quick scripts used to find, alter, and display data on Unix systems. The many examples show how Perl can both work with and exceed the existing Unix tools, and show a wide range of tasks: log scanning, finding and replacing data in multiple files, calculations to prove Seattle receives less rain than New York, and more. I consider myself adept on the Unix command line, though learned several new commands and best practices from this text.

The text includes many helpful tables. These illustrate Perl features and syntax, often in comparison to the Unix utilities grep, sed, and awk. The comparison tables also detail the different flavors of these utilities (classic, POSIX, and GNU). The text discusses commands used in the 1970s, and how the utilities have improved with the introduction of awk, Perl, and the GNU tools, which in turn borrow features from Perl. Other tables show problem solving commands, illustrating how different problems would be solved with grep, sed, awk, or Perl.

Recommended to those who do or want to spend time wrangling data on Unix. The text assumes a fair amount of Unix knowledge. If weak on Unix, first read "Learning the bash Shell" to learn a Unix shell. The second part of Minimal Perl covers Perl programming, which may obviate the need for "Learning Perl" or similar introductory Perl text.

This book is being promoted as a Perl introduction for those who are already familiar with other popular shell tools such as grep, sed, and awk. I can't vouch for how useful it is in that context, although the quality of material and delivery style probably make it a good resource.

I came at the book from a different angle. Perl is familiar, but the other shell tools aren't. I started exploring Linux and UNIX when the GUI shells were starting to become useful in their own right and find/grep/sed/awk didn't seem as important. Perl has largely been an application programming language for me, so I never learned more than the barest hint of its scripting power. There is a huge "shell scripting tool" shaped hole in my Perl and UNIX knowledge.

"Minimal Perl" has been rapidly filling that gap. Even the first 20 pages were enlightening - they showed information on some of the more useful command-line options to Perl along with plentiful examples. Remember that for the last nine years "perl" eq "application language" in my head. The only command line options I cared about were -w and -T, and I stopped caring about -w when 5.6 was released. My new understanding of -l, -n, and -p meant that I could suddenly whip out a quick one-liner for a simple task, rather than write too many lines of C-style code for the same job.

I have been bouncing through the book as I find one of my needs matched by a chapter subject, but the rest of the book has been more of the same. You practice using Perl in combination with other shell tools and then as a complete replacement for those tools. The concepts from this book have saved my [...] a few times already, as I was able to combine them with my existing knowledge of Perl to find and fix code issues quickly.

The writing style is enjoyable. "Minimal Perl" is written in a relaxed, light-hearted manner which still manages to convey thoughts very clearly. You will learn a lot about the differences between Perl and the shell tools, even if you weren't that familiar with the shell tools in the first place. You will learn about the author's almost unhealthy love of AWK before he discovered Perl. More importantly, you'll learn how to use Perl as more than an awkward replacement for C++.

The physical layout of the book is first-rate, which I have come to expect from Manning. The font is large and readable. The book is printed on good thick paper, which matters more than I would have thought. The tables and code samples are easy to find, although I would have appreciated a table listing in the table of contents. After double-checking through this book while writing the review, that's the only complaint I was able to come up with: a table listing would be nice. [...]

I recommend this book to anyone who knows Perl but hasn't used it to do any dirty work in the shell. This will have an impact on when and how you use Perl.

Like some others, I abandoned Perl years ago, in part because I objected to its lack of object orientation.

This book has brought be back, but only for certain purposes. The author shows how one-line Perl commands can perform tasks for which one might otherwise use sed or grep. In many cases the Perl command includes additional features not always found in the equivalent Unix command.

I have found this book invaluable in helping me to automate maintenance tasks on my website.

Yes, Perl 6 (object oriented Perl running in a virtual machines) is five or six years late, but when you are writing one-liners you don't need objects anyway.

Perhaps the world has gone overboard on this object-oriented thing. If you are like me and had abandoned Perl consider returning to it for certain tasks with the aid of Minimal Perl.

One thing I really loved about this book is that it is short and sweet, well written, clear. It covers extremely popular functionality (text search, text manipulation, column/field manipulation, file search) in Perl as it compares to the popular tools: grep, sed, awk, and find (including extended and GNU varieties). It documents how to do the equivalent in Perl, but also covers the advantages and disadvantages in doing these chores Perl. The coverage is really well written.

What really struck me personally, is that for a long time, I was baffled about why there was no simple way to extract columns or fields from fixed-width data. I used regular expression or split in Perl, which I thought was overkill. Unix has simple mechanisms using cut and awk for this, and after many hours scouring the net and published books, I couldn't find any coverage of a simple solution, until I came across this book.

If you do any automation on Unix (or even Windows) that requires extracting or manipulating text data, this book is an ultimate resource for your library. Anyone serious about Perl and/or system administration type of chores, should not pass this book up.

The cw tells you to not to use perl when traditional commands will do, but this book tosses that aside. It thoroughly covers several use cases where perl really does a better job. In addition, by switching from sed, grep, awk, and so forth completely to perl, you don't have to think as much of syntax stuff each time you run a command. One of the first things that sold me was eliminating the common stack of greps, and replacing it with a single line of perl.

The book is also well written and enjoyable. You should have some basic abilities in perl or unix/linux, but it provides a lot of introductory material that is specific to this book's idiom of minimal perl. If you have questions about the book, the publisher provides a forum to ask the author.

If you believe in the unix way, but are sometimes frustrated by whichever unix you use, or especially if you switch between unices, this book offers a way to cure that frustration.

I've been trying to learn PERL for a while now. However, time and complications led to me holding off on learning PERL. I did manage to pick up SED and AWK fairly quickly because of mainly dealing with text files on a UNIX platform. This book took that knowledge and converted it into simple one-line PERL programs! Most of all, I was still able to work effectively while learning simple scripts here and there. After a couple of days, I had enough background to start using simple scripts in PERL that could do a whole lot more that awk and sed.

Much like the other reviewers, this is more of a gateway book. I have enough background in PERL now to start using the Camel book 'Learning PERL.'

By the way, I know a couple of languages but it's always tough for me to start a new one. This book made it very easy to start on PERL. Easily my favorite book now.

This is an excellent Perl tutorial for those who are already familiar with UNIX/Linux shell scripting and other common utilities like find, sed, grep, and awk. Perl combines the strengths of each of these tools and surpasses them in one powerful and portable scripting language. This book is well worth the time and money spent with it for those in its target audience. This book is very well written. The examples are easy to follow and well thought out. The author clearly has a deep knowledge and long experience with the material presented. He takes a very common sense and practical approach to teaching the essentials of Perl scripting without getting the reader bogged down in all the details and capabilities of the language. He seems to have done an excellent job in selecting those parts of Perl that are of the most use for the greatest number of people who need to make use of it. I highly recommend this book.

A review of Minimal Perl by Tim Maher
By William Julien

Perl Minimalism

Tim Maher's new book, "Minimal Perl" uses a new "minimalist" approach to learning perl. It provides survival skills that one need to meets office deadlines as well techniques to improve even the most experienced perl programmer in a clear and concise writing style. This book is not perl tapas. It is a survival tool.

The minimalist writing technique used by the book leverages on the reader's capabilities. Rather than teaching all of perl, the chapters have distinct topics with clear objectives that involve the reader. It is written clear writing style and true to the minimalist documentation philosophy.

"Minimal perl: for UNIX and Linux users"

The goal of this half of the book is to improve your productivity by starting out with perl fundamentals following with full chapters on "Perl as a better grep command", "Perl as a better awk command" and "Perl as a better find". Chapters are arranged in a way for easy "cookbook".

"Minimal perl; for UNIX and Linux shell programmers"

Perl is a powerful language. It provides many powerful constructs, but little guidance on how the programmer can effectively make well written programs.

Chapters discuss the use of Perl's built in functions, scripting techniques, the use of data and control structures, subroutines and modules. The goal of this part of the book is to teach an effective programming approach.

William Julien

This is an excellent work in how to harness PERL to better use the Linux/ Unix shell and command line. But a warning: this is NOT a good introduction to either the PERL scripting language or shell programming. Rather you need to be familiar with both first before you approach this book, specifically, you need to be familiar with sed, awk, and grep, and you really need to be already familiar with PERL. That said, the book does an excellent job of building on that knowledge and gives some real empowerment.

Minimal Perl focuses on translating UNIX/Linux shell commands to Perl (awk, sed, grep, and the like). It doesn't go into whole programs as much as single-use lines, which is fine for simple tasks like checking log files or filtering text files. There are a few conventional programs thrown in the book but all of them are very short. In fact, the comments generally outweigh the code.
Don't take that as bad, though. Tim Maher introduces some great ideas that I haven't seen in the other Perl books I've read. It's a great reference to have on hand for simple tasks. Maher uses clear examples and clever text to get across some complex (and often difficult to read) Perl.
If your looking for traditional programming book, this probably isn't for you. Stick with O'Reilly for how to write complete programs. Minimal Perl is all about quick and disposable code that's more powerful then shell commands but not the overkill of a complete program.