Customer Reviews

Perl Graphics Programming: Creating SVG, SWF (Flash), JPEG and PNG files with Perl

5 star:		(1)
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Wallace explains how Perl has evolved to have an impressive image reading and writing ability, for the most common graphics formats of GIF, JPEG, PNG and X bitmap. A lot of the heavy lifting has been done for you in two modules - GD and ImageMagick. The chapters on those expose you to simple subroutines that you'd expect in any graphics package.

But Wallace extends the scope to the usage of Postscript and PDF modules. Some Perl developers recognised the need to output in these formats, for compatibility with much professional documentation. So here too, you can take advantage of a lot of prior sweat.

For completeness, the book also has a section on supported vector graphics and animation. Specifically how to use SVG and Flash in Perl. This is perhaps a more specialised need than the previous modules. But good to have here, for some of you.

It should be noted that the book is not really about teaching graphics programming, per se. Wallace assumes you're already up on this. Rather, the book is about the modules and subroutines that give you the elementary graphics implementation vocabulary.

I have decided, this is the last book on software tools I'll ever buy. It didn't have anything that I didn't find while googling the subject. There are no brilliant insights from the author or cookbook recipes that save you time. At best, it's an abridged collation of internet sources on the subject.

I was attempting to write some Perl scripts for graphics manipulation in Linux, and could not find much in the way of relevant documentation. This book supplied the information that I needed.