[ /!\ To the reader :
1 - Please be aware that reviews listed here also include reviews related to the previous 12 years old 3rd edition of the book. Therefore look well at the date of the review, or choose "newest first".
2 - Please refer to the updated note at the end of the review
]
As a computer language specialist, and an early Perl adopter, long before Python or Java, for tackling with art many medium-to-complex problems, and having them quickly solved efficiently and elegantly, I was responsible for introducing Perl in a Tahiti's University Computer Science course - which I taught for 10 years - as an eclectik general programming language, praising it to my students for having brought to me lots of deep pleasure and appreciation since the older fascinating days of Lisp and Prolog.
To this date, O'Reilly has a long successful record at publishing high quality Perl books, like "Programming Perl, 3rd Edition", "Advanced Perl Programming", "Perl Hacks", "Perl Best Practices", and "Computer Science and Perl Programming".
Amongst these books, "Programming Perl" (also know as the "Camel book", or the "Blue book") is certainly the most comprehensive, error free, most precise, most exciting Perl book ever written to date.
"Programming Perl" 3rd Edition was released 12 years ago, to support up to Perl 5.6. Any serious enthousiast Perl programmer might have bought this book 1070 pages long. Despite almost a daily use for over 12 years, mainly as a mainstreem reference manual, my personal copy, though heavily annotated for quick reference, has remained in a very good shape all along. The material I kept coming at are chapter 29 "Functions", which provides the reader with a broad and comprehensive coverage reagarding all Perl built-in functions, and chapter 32 "Standard Modules", which provides a (almost) complete listing of the standard modules comprising the standard Perl distribution, along with a brief but comprehensive description of what each module does.
Long awaited, since Perl jumped from version 5.6 to version 5.14 in the intervening 12 years, I feel very sad to notice that the new 4th edition of the Camel book does not live to its expectations.
Thicker by 12mm, but only 60 pages longer, due to using an unnecessary larger font and thicker paper, the important chapter "Standard Modules", along with chapter 33 "Diagnostic messages", did not make it into this new release. Also, this long awaited new edition does not provide the seasoned Perl programmers with a clearly separate chapter that would have made a terrific job at summarizing for them the language evolution from Perl 5.6 to Perl 5.14.
Since all the information included in the Camel book has, more or less, always been available through the Perldoc and the various man pages installed along with the Perl standard distribution, the only point of buying this book was to gain a practical, up-to-date, efficient, accurate and fast access to this information through an all-in-one book.
As this held up to edition 3, this no longer seems the case with new edition 4. The removal of the very important chapter "Standard Modules" so enjoyable at flipping thru, glancing at, or simply reading, in order to learn and etch so many important programming reflexes, is now a thing of the past. And unfortunately a big loss! Quickly finding out about important modules comprising the Standard Perl distribution will never be again that easy. And in all case, you will a minima now need a computer on hand.
With so many programming frameworks having gained so much popularity in these last 12 years, e.g. Java, Python, Ruby, or PhP, one could have thought that O'Reilly's release of this new edition was to give a renewed interest and incentive to the large existing base of already seasoned Perl developers.
Hélas, this is not the case. For seasoned Perl developers, I suggest that keeping the 3rd edition of the Camel book, and reading at leisure the man pages "perluniXXX" and "perlXXXdelta" is the way to go, instead of buying this new edition.
For new Perl developers, I'm not sure! Though this edition is up-to-date regarding the language features, it misses the important "Standard modules" chapter, a minima an index thereof.
As for me, I got this new edition in pre-release at half its price. Therefore, I will clip Chapter 32 from the edition 3, stick it in edition 4, and transfer in my lengthly annotations, to be ready to go another 12 years or so.
I urge O'Reilly to consider the followings for further editions of the beautiful Camel book :
- Include chapter "Standard Modules"
- Provide a chapter "Language evolutions"
Then, the Camel book legend will continue stronger than ever, and any one will quickly forget the mis-adventures of Edition 4.
Note -- 2013/03/03
After all, knowing how difficult it is to write a good average technical book, and finding myself using this 4th edition often since I first wrote this review a year ago (sometimes complementing it with for the library with the 3rd edition -- not a big deal), absolutely convinced, from reading ten's of other technical books, that the new "Camel" book, as it is called, still stands as one of the most accurate and comprehensive book ever written on any computer language, here Perl -- revered as the Bible amonsgt the Perl community -- I feel I was being unfair in giving this new edition only 3 stars, quite an under-evaluation.
Today, I'm proud to enhance my review and rate this book a well deserved 5 stars. If 6* were allowed, I would give it 6 ;)
Cheers,
Franck Porcher, Ph.D -- Theoretical Computer science (Paris)
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