Customer Reviews

Perl Developer's Guide (Book/CD-ROM package)

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

 

 

This is one of the good books available in the market for a Perl Programmer. It has a lot of content, and if you take the font-size into account (fonts are small), you have lots to read. Perl programmers for the Windows platform would find this book to be pretty interesting. However, the authors could have done more justice if they could have given short but lucid examples to prove their point. Many a times, they either quickly digressed from their examples, or would have given some glib remarks about an important example.

I would have given this book more than 3 stars, but for the numerous typos and other minor errors which have been overlooked by the authors. At one point the authors, proudly proclaim that they had used Perl's Regular-Expressions to edit the book (???).

Nevertheless, I am sure the authors would notice the typos and minor mistakes that is rampant in this book and take remedial action in future editions. Perl being an idiosyncratic and idiomatic language, there should not be room for such syntactical errors which confounds the reader all the more.

Despite these reservations, I would enthusiastically recommend this book to any Perl programmer, particularly Windows users, as a guide and reference.

This book was both clear and concise. That is a difficult job. I was impressed that throughout the entire book, I didn't find any bloated garbage. It was a pleasure to read.

Perl Developer's Guide starts off a bit rough. The first chapter, An Overview of Perl, is enough to make anyone put away the book. But after getting scalars and arrays down pat, everything takes off. PDG will introduce you to almost everything Perl can do. From Windows programming to GUIs to CGI, this book has it all.

I've never read a book that was more poorly edited than this one. It's full of errors - typographical errors, formatting errors, even some errors in the code samples. It's not bad if you're able to recognize the errors and figure out what the author meant, but I wouldn't put this book in the hands of a beginning programmer.

The book does have a lot of information in it though. Nearly 1000 pages with small print. The explanations could be better at times - the author frequently uses concepts that haven't been explained yet, which can leave the reader lost.

Excellent treatment of topics. I still haven't read the whole book, but the chapters on Functions, Contexts and References were very enlightening, and the clearest explanation I've ever read. It has lots of diagrams explaining how Perl recognizes and translates code. For instance, the chapter on Functions has detailed explanation of the Argument Stack ("@_"). Think of it as a sort of Camel Book illustrated.

The book has much material, but the methodology is bad.

The best methodology is to provide sample input, the code,
and the output.

The author in many cases provides just code with neither input
nor output. The reader therefore cannot validate his understand-
ing against any kind of input.

There are also lots of little errors.

This book is the much needed update to the first book by Ed and Michelle, published in 1998 that went by a different name, "Perl 5, Complete". The first book came out way too early with too many errors. Ed acknowledges this in his preface to the second edition. I enjoyed his first book, because catching errors made me learn the material better, but the second edition is soo much better.

High points for this second edition include:

1) a good tutorial for object-oriented programming starting with creating modules up to full object-oriented programming with perl/tk.

2) a great section on data-structures like arrays-of-arrays, and hash of hashes, etc... that are essential if you want to do intermediate or above Perl programming.

3) A great chapter on real-world examples using perl/tk and OLE programing with Perl for Microsoft Windows plus other code samples.

4) Some great new appendixes for Perl "grammer and structure" that weren't in the first edition. Basically a concise reference for symantics that would benefit anybody.

5) A much improved index that was practically non-existent in the first edition.

All in all, I would say the second edition would be a good edition to learning and even improving your Perl skills since it is a huge tome of Perl information that can be both used as a reference and as a tutorial.

I bought this book with virtually no knowledge of programming in Perl, and it seemed quite good, and indeed I think it makes for a good introduction/tutorial for Perl. However, having now read "Programming Perl" (O'Reilly) written by Larry Wall et. al. , I've decided that it is a much better book than this one. On that basis, assuming "Programming Perl" gets 5 stars, this one only gets 3.