Perl 5 How-To (Paperback)

~ (Author), Aidan Humphreys (Author), Ed Weiss (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

PERL 5 How-To is a solid tutorial and quick reference for anyone aiming to write professional, full-featured PERL scripts. The material is presented as a series of "How do I ...?" problems. For each problem, the authors discuss the appropriate solution in detail and use concrete examples in the form of commented source listings. The book covers all of the core language features and delves into many specialized applications, including client/server and network programming, binary trees, graphics, UNIX system administration, and CGI programming. The problem-solution approach makes this a strong tutorial as well as a great reference for finding quick answers when you get stuck.

PERL 5 How-To assumes that you know UNIX well and have some programming experience. Novices will probably make headway more quickly with a different book. But if you are up to speed with programming basics, you'd be hard pressed to find a more comprehensive guide to solving real-world problems.

Product Description

Perl is the scripting language used by most people seetting up their own Web servers. This book gives Perl programmers everything needed to write professional scripts and solve practical problems in an easy-to-use, topic-organized format. It provides more than 100 real-life programming situations and their solutions.

Product Details

• Paperback: 860 pages
• Publisher: Waite Group Pr; Bk&CD-Rom edition (June 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571690581
• ISBN-13: 978-1571690586
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,806,572 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good reference, poor "teacher"!, July 4, 1997

By A Customer

This book is an excellent "do-it-yourself" CGI reference, but it has a few minor flaws that prevent it from being the ultimate Perl book.

First, this book is not intended to teach Perl or CGI scripting. Any novice would encounter serious difficulty trying to piece together the code fragments that make up this book.

Second, an experienced Perl programmer may find that the "code fragment" approach to creating general functions often requires extraneous code and added complexity. Still, the incredible comprehensiveness of the book make it a useful reference for generating new ideas and new approaches.

If you already have a basic Perl book, this book would make a great addition, helping to problem-solve more complex dynamic web page requirements.

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for Unix, dubious for Win 95, January 21, 1997

By A Customer

This book is clear, well-organized, and has many useful examples, but the authors did not check their examples on Windows 95 systems. For instance, and this is not a minor point, they say that you can run command lines under DOS in the same way you can under Unix. Not true! Even something as simple as perl -e 'print "hello";' will not work. Because of this, the book would be far more useful for those working on Unix systems than for those using Windows. I am not sure if there is a better book available, but "Perl 5 Unleashed" does have the correct information on command lines.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book with plenty of great examples., November 21, 1996

By A Customer

This book covers the more popular and usefull areas of Perl. The book contains great examples of how to use/do various things within Perl. Also all examples are real-world based. This is my most used Perl book in my collection, by far