Customer Reviews

The Perl CD Bookshelf, Version 3.0: 7 Bestselling Books on CD-ROM Includes a Bonus Book! Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

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A review of this CD is rather problematic. Most of the books on this CD (as far as I read them before) are worth 4-5 stars. So this CD with online searching is worth ...5 stars... I will only comment on the CD version of the books and not on each single book (look at the reviews for the single books if you are interested in that).

Personally a CD with books is just an add-on to the printed versions, that I can read everywhere (bed, beach ...) and that I can mark in different colours and write on. Online books for me are for online searching and online reading of a few chapters.

This CD contains all the books in HTML format with a Java based full text search engine (works for me with IE 5.5 and mostly works with Netscape ... and an HTML based Master Index. There is a problem in the Master Index for the letter "L" (bad links, see Errata). Go to the O'Reilly website and download the updated file for this index.

Additionally to the online searching capabilities I really like the capability to use the WWW links to external resources directly from the CD (e.g. to CPAN). I think that the quality of the HTML translation of the books is quite high. It seems however that you need a rather new browser because we had some problems with Netscape 4.7 with the documentation. I like that all the links within the documentation are relative so that you can copy the CD wherever you like and still use it (even put it on your internal WWW server which is of course illegal). The size is rather small (60MB for all the books) so that you can put it on your laptop for mobil work.

You can find the following books on the CD:
- Perl in a Nutshell (2. Edition)
- Programming Perl (3. Edition)
- Perl & XML
- Mastering Perl/Tk
- Learning Perl (3. Edition)
- Perl Cookbook
- Perl & LWP

The book "Perl in a Nutshell (2nd Edition) as a printed version is part of the package as a "bonus book". I like it as a reference book.

Unfortunately O'Reilly did not put all its Perl books on this CD. For total happiness I am missing the following books (name your own):
- Programming the Perl DBI
- Perl for ORACLE DBAs
- CGI Programming with Perl (2nd Edition)

The price for the CD is not really low but compared with the printed versions of all the books it is reasonable from my point of view.

If you are a mobile Perl user I can really recommend this CD.

I am a professional UNIX admin, and often do contract work.
I carry the UNIX, Network, and Perl CD bookshelves in my laptop case so I still have access to 15+ incredible books on the road.
Well worth the money!

This is essential. Perl docs are amazing and great, but sometimes you just need a little more info. This isn't just a compilation of books. This is a compilation of SEARCHABLE books. The great thing about version 3 is that the files are still in html and still fully externally searchable, unlike later pdf versions.

The O'Reilly Llama is perhaps the most famous PERL book ever written; this package starts with the Llama, and then just keeps going, and going, and going...

The only drawback with this package is the sheer volume of information that gets laid on you all at once. It's a lot, to say the least. But if you are serious about reaching Guru status, this will get you there.

Well you get 7 great books on a CD, what can I say more?
Even though I already had some of these books in a dead tree version I did not regret any cent spended on this CD Bookshelf. It is almost all time in my drive and the search function is so helpfull you never want to miss it again.