Customer Reviews

Perl: Essential Programs for Your Survival at Work: Book 2 in the Rosetta Stone Series for Computer Programmers and Script-Writers

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a book filled with scripts. Over a 100 of them. The pages look like they came out of a cheap printer. That's not a problem. The problem is, that there's no CD included with the book, and there's no website to download the scripts.

The scripts are supposed to be useful at work, for instance when your boss demands from you that you solve a certain problem. Granted, this book contains a lot of scripts than can be used in different situations. But you have to type them in yourself. And that costs time. You will make errors. You have to hunt those errors down. That will cost time.

The author does not have a support website and neither does the publisher.

The book does not contain an index to enable you to look up keywords. There's an index in the beginning of the book with the names of the scripts and a one-line description of each script. At first, this seems to be convenient, but the second day you want to use this book, the absence of an index, combined with having to do a lot (!) of typing yourself, combined with the certainty of making typos while typing, makes this book almost useless. It is annoying.

When I wrote an email to the author about this, his answer was useless. On top of that, he wrote another email, warning me not to post any of the scripts on my website. I have never received such an email from the many other authors or publishers from whom I have bought books.

My advise: don't buy this book.

This is the easiest to understand most helpful programming book I have read. It is a must have book.

I found that studying this book was a great way to learn PERL - actually, it has fantastic examples that let the reader understand the process of writing solid code in any language.

This is, hands down, one of the best "how-to" books on PERL programming that is available.

Personally, I love this book. GREAT examples from the real-world. People who have NO experience with UNIX-LINUX environments should study a book for beginners before considering this one. I can only think of two types of users who might want to AVOID this book: heavy-duty math/statistics users and Perl programmers who are exclusively object-oriented (O-O). NOTE: There is no CD-ROM available for this book, nor is there a web-site that contains all of the examples, but this book's MANY examples save me lots of time. This book is better than being given a copy of the test before an exam: it's like being given the exam with all of the answers filled in.