Programming the Perl DBI: Database programming with Perl 1st Edition

by Tim Bunce (Author), Alligator Descartes (Author)

48 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-1565926998

ISBN-10: 9781565926998

Why is ISBN important?

Share <Embed>

Other Sellers

from

Other Sellers

See all 4 versions

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Jenson Books Inc

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Thursday, May 12 if you spend $25 on items shipped by Amazon

Or fastest delivery Tuesday, May 10

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

Sold by starstoreUS and Fulfilled by Amazon.

Available at a lower price from other sellers that may not offer free Prime shipping.

List Price: $39.99 Details

Save: $9.35 (23%)

FREE delivery Tuesday, May 10

Or fastest delivery Friday, May 6. Order within 11 hrs 18 mins

Available at a lower price from other sellers that may not offer free Prime shipping.

One of the greatest strengths of the Perl programming language is its ability to manipulate large amounts of data. Database programming is therefore a natural fit for Perl, not only for business applications but also for CGI-based web and intranet applications.The primary interface for database programming in Perl is DBI. DBI is a database-independent package that provides a consistent set of routines regardless of what database product you use--Oracle, Sybase, Ingres, Informix, you name it. The design of DBI is to separate the actual database drivers (DBDs) from the programmer's API, so any DBI program can work with any database, or even with multiple databases by different vendors simultaneously.Programming the Perl DBI is coauthored by Alligator Descartes, one of the most active members of the DBI community, and by Tim Bunce, the inventor of DBI. For the uninitiated, the book explains the architecture of DBI and shows you how to write DBI-based programs. For the experienced DBI dabbler, this book reveals DBI's nuances and the peculiarities of each individual DBD.The book includes:

An introduction to DBI and its design
How to construct queries and bind parameters
Working with database, driver, and statement handles
Debugging techniques
Coverage of each existing DBD
A complete reference to DBI

This is the definitive book for database programming in Perl.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Some of these items ship sooner than the others.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

by Tim Bunce Paperback
$30.64
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Sold by starstoreUS and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.
Get it as soon as Tuesday, May 10
by Jarkko Hietaniemi Paperback
$20.16
Only 2 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Get it as soon as Tuesday, May 10
by Tom Christiansen Paperback
$43.99
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Sold by WESTCOAST BOOK STORE and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.
Get it as soon as Tuesday, May 10

Tom Christiansen
70
Paperback
82 offers from $1.75
Jarkko Hietaniemi
38
Paperback
49 offers from $1.50
Mark Lutz
1,528
Paperback
in Functional Software Programming
74 offers from $35.75
Tom Christiansen
100
Paperback
41 offers from $5.81
Randal L. Schwartz
15
Paperback
36 offers from $1.91
Simon Cozens
27
Paperback
36 offers from $2.06

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The birth of new modules for the Perl scripting language is a regular occurrence, and the publication of an O'Reilly book about one of these modules is a sign of coming of age. Perl's DBI module, which facilitates the database-independent operation of Perl, achieves its rite of passage this month with the arrival of Alligator Descartes and Tim Bunce's excellent Programming Perl's DBI. Perl's DBI interface is maintained by Bunce and includes submodule interfaces to Oracle, MySQL, Sybase, Microsoft ODBC, and many other smaller databases. O'Reilly Perl book aficionados take note: this is the cheetah book, named for the animal that graces its cover.

Far from being a formalized how-to or man page, Programming Perl's DBI is a mini textbook in database programming, ideal for CPAN-savvy Perl programmers with little or no experience in database programming. Descartes and Bunce develop primitive notions of databases by using flat files, and they introduce relational databases with careful didactic motivation. The example database used throughout the book contains ancient sacred monolithic sites in the UK and elsewhere, of which Stonehenge is the most famous. Readers will learn about these primitive places while storing, updating, deleting, sorting, and locking their descriptors using flat files, nonrelational and relational databases, and a tutorial on SQL. The last chapters describe the peculiarities of interacting with ODBC and introduce DBI's Perl-less diagnostic shell and database proxying.

The authors use many modules--including DBI itself--that are not part of the vanilla Perl distribution, and Descartes and Bunce introduce them without explaining where to find or build them. Perl newbies with no CPAN experience may find themselves derailed early. The Storage module seems not to be available on CPAN at all (at the time of this writing). Fortunately, DBI and friends build, test, and install seamlessly under Linux/Red Hat 6.1.

At 350 pages, Programming the Perl DBI is 60 percent text--filled with highly annotated Perl code--and 40 percent appendices covering a detailed specification of DBI and 3-to-5-page descriptions of each of the 14 supported databases. Brevity is a large component of this book's wit. Clarity is the rest of it. --Peter Leopold

About the Author

Tim Bunce has been a perl5 porter since 1994, contributing to the development of the Perl language and many of its core modules. He is the author and maintainer of the DBI, DBD::Oracle,and Oracle::OCI modules, and author and co-maintainer of The Perl Module List. Tim is the founder and CTO of Data-Plan Services, a perl, database, and performance consultancy with an international client base. Prior to that we was Technical Director (CTO) of IG in the UK where he was awarded by British Telecom for his role in the rapid development of their Call Management Information service, a system implemented in Perl. He is co-author, along with Alligator Descartes, of Programming the Perl DBI, the definitive book on DBI, published by O'Reilly & Associates in February 2000.

Start reading Programming the Perl DBI: Database programming with Perl on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1565926994
Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (February 29, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 366 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781565926998
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1565926998
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.27 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.86 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #368,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9 in Relational Databases
- #18 in Perl Programming
- #99 in Object-Oriented Software Design

Customer Reviews:
48 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		54%
4 star		17%
3 star		20%
2 star		5%
1 star		5%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Brian Donnelly

Great hardcore, Bad basics

Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2000

Verified Purchase

I do agree that this book is a must for anyone developing with the perl DBI. This book has shown me that it is an incredibly flexible module and made me think twice about recommending PHP when dealing with db functions. It covers everything from setting up the module to ODBC and SQL manipulation. There are also many things that are not mentioned in the documentation in here. I was frustrated with the lack of examples when it came to database manipulation though. It was not the purpose of this book to cover these areas in depth but to only spend a paragraph on things like the SQL JOIN functions is kind of dissapointing...anybody hear a book idea there?

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Jonathan Leffler

Useful, even for insiders

Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2000

Verified Purchase

I'm biassed; I'm the primary author of the DBD::Informix module. And I bought my copy of the book.
The Cheetah Book has a lot of useful information in it. Obviously, it describes the core DBI functionality very clearly, but it also contains a lot of information that was not previously available in a form comparable to what is in the book. For example, the extensive Appendix B, which lists a lot of details about each of the various drivers, is very useful and informative indeed. The information is not yet available elsewhere in this format, and you'd have to download all the drivers to be able to get all the information in one place. The guide to using the DBI Proxy Server is invaluable. The non-DBI database information in Chapter 2 is interesting; it shows how diverse the Perl modules are. And the comparison with Win32::ODBC is illuminating.
There is information in the main text which has not been documented before, such as the "use DBI qw(:sql_types);" -- that isn't in Appendix A (the DBI Specification), either, but that oversight will no doubt be fixed so that it is in 'perldoc DBI' by the time DBI 1.14 is available on CPAN.
This book does not attempt to teach you the rudiments of Perl, and nor should it. It does not teach everything about SQL, and nor should it. It doesn't teach you about every possible use of DBI, and it shouldn't try to do that either. It is a pity that the use of DBI with the Apache web server and mod_perl is not covered at all, but even that would be difficult to do sensibly. Half the effort would be in explaining how to handle HTML and CGI and not in using DBI per se. Nevertheless, should there be a second edition, this is something that should be covered in outline, even if not in complete detail.
If you have any intention of working with DBI, either as a regular user or as a driver writer, you need this book. It is clear and pleasant to read. Having the DBI specification printed in book format is worth the price of the book alone; the rest of the material is also very valuable.
Go, Buy!

35 people found this helpful

Helpful

Bill W. Cunningham

Great Job!

Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2000

Verified Purchase

Anyone who has worked with DBI has heard of these authors. However, this is not just a reprint of existing documentation. There is a lot of new material here. Every type of database from flat files to networked relational servers is covered. Strengths and weaknesses of each are considered.
Anyone who works with data of any kind will find much food for thought here. Great job, Tim and Alligator.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Good...but a bit outdated

Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2014

Verified Purchase

Screenshots using Netscape browser... Some of the functions are outdated, but at least they give me a starting point to start googling.

Helpful

It's a good book!

Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2012

Verified Purchase

It isn't excellent book and is an old text, but there aren't many texts about this subject and this book fill these space.

Helpful

Philip R. Heath

What's There Is Good, But We Need More

Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2002

This is a good DBI reference for experienced perl programmers. The authors give you a good road map in the introduction so that you can find what you need to accomplish your task.
I needed to interface to an existing database so I skipped chapter 2 on alternative persistent storage mechanisms.
Having prior experience with SQL, I also skipped chapter 3.
Chapters 4-6 are where the majority of people are going to find useful information. There you will find good explanations on connecting to databases, executing SQL statements, and some advanced features such as binding variables. The authors give a good treatment of the various ways to execute queries with performance tradeoffs.
Chapter 7 is only useful if you are working on a Windows platform. My database is on Solaris so this wasn't something that I needed.
As I said, though, what's there is good, but I there is definitely something missing. I needed to be able to call Oracle stored procedures as well as executing simple SQL queries. It would be nice to include some examples of calling stored procedures using the major vendors: Oracle, Informix, Sybase, etc. This information is hard to come by on the web. There are subtleties in using inout parameters in stored procedure calls that require some extra work in perl. You have to size variables large enough to store the largest value that is in the database. Since perl handles all string sizes dynamically, I used sprintf to force the strings to be large enough before calling the stored procedure. I don't know if you would run into these issues with outher databases, but it would be good to have this information with the rest of this text. That would make this fine book complete.

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

David Precious

Helpful reference book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 29, 2002

Verified Purchase

This book doesn't really cover much about Perl and the DBI module that you couldn't find with a quick trawl through Google, but it is handy to have all the material you need together to hand. If you're the kind of person who likes to be able to just pick up a book to find what you need to know, it's well worth buying - it's an authoritative source of information and will get you writing decent Perl + DBI scripts to interact with a database in no time.

3 people found this helpful

vgrimaldi

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 28, 2015

Verified Purchase

Perfect as described

See all reviews

Programming the Perl DBI: Database programming with Perl 1st Edition

Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought