Customer Reviews

Win32 Perl Scripting: The Administrator's Handbook

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

 

 

If you use Perl on Win32 you need THIS book. There is plenty of good material elsewhere on Perl for Unix/Linux; and plenty out there on platform-independent aspects of the Perl language. But the "Camel" book (Programming Perl 3rd Edition, by Wall, Christiansen and Orwant) and all the other excellent standard sources don't help you with Win32 specific tasks. This book shows examples for managing user and machine accounts, leveraging event logs, using Perl scripts to do any admin task. Running Perl scripts as services. Even the very latest Win32 things like WMI and ADSI. I use this book as a companion to "Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions" also by Dave Roth, which helps with OLE automation and such.

Get the "Camel" book, this book, and ActiveState Perl and you will be all set to do whatever Perl thing you please on Win32.

Majority of Perl books deals with UNIX. However in a real world, whether you like it or not, most IS departments have to deal with Windows NT/2000 servers. These departments also require knowledgeable administrators to take care of this environment. Here is where this book comes in handy. The author, also known from his previous book (WIN32 PERL Programming. The standard extensions) shows us how we can use Perl to do day to day tasks on Windows Servers. The book offers many ready to use scripts and also explains the rationale for using techniques, the way it was used in this book. I rated this book 5 stars because not only it enriched my knowledge but also it saved me many hours of trying to write similar scripts on my own. In essence: A must have!

WIN 32 PERL is not a book for beginners. You are probably a systems administrator looking for solutions to you time-consuming administration tasks. If so, look this book over.

The book is written in a small font making it a book you need to read when your mind is fresh. It does contain detailed coding information for the various system problems. WIN 32 PERL contains nine chapters explaining things from Monitoring and Reporting and Logon Scripts to ADSI and WMI.

The content page is only three-and-a-half-pages long but the index of fifteen pages more than makes up for the lack in the content section. Finally, there is a 20-page review of other books available to assist you in your administrative needs.

If you need to automate administrative tasks, ignore the O'Reilly Perl-Admin books, this one has a lot more substance and a very little fluff.

Dave Roth is a prolific author of many very popular Perl modules for 32 bit Windows operating systems: Win32::Daemon, Win32::Perms, Win32::ODBC, Win32::AdminMisc, and many others. He is also an active participant in the Perl WinNT Admin mailing list

This guy has a lot of real world experience with Perl and Win32. He's solved a lot of difficult problems. More than that, he does a great job of regularly taking the time to document and convey that knowledge on to others. The book is a great distillation of that knowledge.

If I could only have a 5 Perl books, this would be one of them. The technical writing is excellent, and it is essential "fluff-less". The examples are clear and of immediate practical value, many are based on modules authored by Dave and freely available. My personal favorite is the Win32::Daemon module for implementing Perl scripts as NT/2000 services. We can only hope that Dave will write another book expanding on ADSI and WMI.

A great reference for Perl junkies that handle SysAdmin stuff. A great guidebook for introducing automation to the Windows Platform. Perfect for the unix admin who suddenly annexes a windows box to their domain. While not the definitive text for Perl on Windows, it does do a good job of breaking out most of the features that would be useful for administrators.

Roth focuses alot on automation for getting rid of boring, repetititve task that are necessary to good system administration . His example include some good details on how Windows handles it's versions of unix cmds and processes. From automated log handling to process creation and building new Services to registry manipulation, Roth tackles many challenges a good admin faces for a Windows box.

This book is good for any level of user. Newbies can pick up good ideas about system administration, while experts can pickup some valuable tips and scripts for using Perl on Windows.

Recently I was given the task of writing some Perl scripts to manipulate processes on a Windows server. I've been writing Perl scripts on Solaris and Linux for some time, but had no idea where to start on Windows.

One of the scripts needed to find a process by name. If the process wasn't running the script needed to start a new instance and send out an e-mail to notify the support team. Using Roth's book I was up and running in a matter of hours. Prior to that I had spent days combing the Internet looking for tips on digging into the bowels of Windows (not a pleasant image) with Perl.

Roth gives you multiple ways to tackle a problem, but voices his opinion on why you might want to choose one method over another. However, at times he makes assumptions about your knowledge of Windows which can lead to frustration. His section on WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is very brief for such a complex subject for example.

I wouldn't recommend this book for someone new to Perl, but if you are familiar with Perl and need to write scripts for Windows you will find Roth's book useful indeed.

I also have Dave's WIN32 Perl Programming, The Standard extensions. I consider this to be a better book if you want to understand what the code is doing and to get full details on functions within the extensions.

This book is quite simply code. Albeit good code, it certainly won't teach you much unless you're a seasoned UNIX perl geek delving into windoze. If you're able to take the code (free for download on roth.net) and implement it without needing to change it much, then newbies will find this book useful. The first chapter addresses the reader as a potential newbie to perl.. something most of the code isn't geared for if you're starting to learn perl. Most win32 admins that aren't perl hackers that I know would find much of this book greek.. learn perl first is my advice.. and get Dave's other book.

If Dave wanted to make this a good book for newbies, he could have done a much better job of explaining the code. Even just putting more comments in the code.. like programmers should do anyway!

Ron

This book is just awesome in that it covers different Windows libraries from Perl. The material is rather advanced in both usage of Windows libraries and Perl language usage. The topics are organized in common administrative areas.

I felt the ADSI and WMI coverage was just really brief; perhaps I just want more of this good stuff. I definitely hope this chapter can be expanded in a future edition.

One thing that was amazing is that Roth demonstrates how to investigate the LDAP schema of Active Directory, which is rather useful when you need to search for properties, and need to know what those properties actually are. Nothing from Microsoft that I found, documents how to do this for VBScript; I did find some rather scary C++ code that alludes this functionality, but Roth not only demonstrates it, but shows how it can be used.

Anyone serious about scripting and Windows administration should snatch this book like yesterday. It will undoubtedly be an essential resource for any IT department.

Concise, well written, pragmatic, and lots of exemplary code. If you need to automate administrative tasks, ignore the O'Reilly Perl-Admin books, this one has a lot more substance and a lot less fluff.

Dave Roth is a prolific author of many very popular Perl modules for 32 bit Windows operating systems: Win32::Daemon, Win32::Perms, Win32::ODBC, Win32::AdminMisc, and many others. ....

This guy has a lot of real world experience with Perl and Win32. He's solved a lot of difficult problems. More than that, he does a great job of regularly taking the time to document and convey that knowledge on to others. The book is a great distillation of that knowledge.