Advanced Perl Programming
June 18th, 2010 by CGI & PHP.com
Product Description
With a worldwide community of users and more than a million dedicated programmers, Perl has proven to be the most effective language for the latest trends in computing and business. Every programmer must keep up with the latest tools and techniques. This updated version of Advanced Perl Programming from O'Reilly gives you the essential knowledge of the modern Perl programmer. Whatever your current level of Perl expertise, this book will help you push your skills to… More >>
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June 18th, 2010 at 8:27 pm
This book as has been said "is a completely different book and not worthy of being called the second edition of such a good book". Oreilly has dissapointed me for the first time, since most oreilly perl books are excellent value and of a high quality. Instead as in the first edition that covers a good range of advanced topics this book chooses some rare and obscure ones. This book is of little use to the programmer whom has ever picked up the cook book or perl programming by same publisher. Unfortunely for me I did not have the chance to see the book in person, or a truthful review.
Rating: 2 / 5
June 18th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
If you liked the first edition of Advanced Perl Programming you are sure to really like this updated version. For those of you who did not read the earlier edition you missed an excellent book that is now even better. The author provides thorough coverage of some of the most common Perl programming techniques that are beyond the scope of most beginning books. Some of the areas examined include the Class Model, Parsing, Templating, Objects, Databases, Applications, using Natural Language Tools, programming in an event-driven environment, testing, using inline extensions, and even a section on having fun with Perl. With plenty of case studies and programming examples it is easy to follow along and understand the concepts.
The section on parsing is one of the best I have seen anywhere. Likewise the section on templating is excellent and introduces the reader to items like HTML:Mason. Each of these sections provides excellent coverage and clear guidance on additional modules you may want to install to get the results you want. Advanced Perl Programming, Second Edition is highly recommended to all Perl programmers.
Rating: 5 / 5
June 18th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
The Perl world has changed drastically in the last five years! Author Simon Cozens has done an outstanding job of keeping up with those changes in this 2nd edition of the book by taking you through some of the most important Perl techniques and resources available at the moment.
Cozens begins by introducing a few common tricks advanced Perl programmers use with examples from popular Perl modules. Next, the author covers parsing irregular or unstructured data with Parse::RecDescent and Parse::Yapp, plus parsing HTML and XML. Then, he details some of the most common tools for templating and when to use them, including formats, Text::Template, HTML::Template, HTML::Mason, and the Template Toolkit. The author continues by explaining various ways to efficiently store and retrieve complex data using objects–a concept commonly called object-relational mapping. In addition, the author next shows you some of the ways Perl can manipulate natural language data: inflections, conversions, parsing, extraction, and Bayesian analysis. He also reviews some of the problems and solutions to make the most of Perl's Unicode support. The author next looks at the popular Perl event-based environment for task scheduling, multitasking, and non-blocking I/O code. Next, the author covers the essentials of testing your code. Then, he talks about how to extend Perl by writing code in other languages, using the Inline::* modules. Finally, he closes on a lighter note with a few recreational use of Perl.
With the preceding in mind, the author has done an excellent job of making sure that you will have a good idea of how to use what's available in Perl; and, how you can save yourself time and effort by using Perl and the resources available to get the job done. At the end of the day, you'll be ready to use and integrate whatever developments come down the line.
Rating: 5 / 5
June 18th, 2010 at 10:21 pm
This book truly lives up to it's title – this is a book for advanced developers who have a solid understanding of not only the Perl language but of higher level computer science concepts.
While there are some intermediate topics and short introductions, this is not a book to learn theory — this is a book to show you how to take the theoretical concepts you've learned elsewhere and apply them to Perl, and to understand more of the internal workings of the language.
Rating: 5 / 5
June 18th, 2010 at 11:56 pm
As other reviewers have noted, there's not a whole lot in common with the first edition of this book, either in feel or content. It's rather questionable whether this merits being called a second edition. Something like 'Problem solving with CPAN' would be a more accurate title (then again, perhaps it's just as well I don't work in the publishing industry).
It does still cover some of the material of the first edition, such as globs, closures, AUTOLOAD, the Perl class model, and some Perl internals, but it's all been compressed into one chapter.
The other chapters discuss various subjects using CPAN modules and gives some insight into how the material from the first chapter was used to solve these problems. A wide variety of issues are discussed, including serialization and object relational mapping, natural language parsing, templating and unicode. Some superficially similar material could be found in Perl Cookbook, but the discussion here is deeper (and more up to date), there's very little overlap.
Exactly how much you get out of the book will probably be dependent on how well you know the innards of CPAN and how interesting you find the topics. I liked the parsing and natural language processing chapters a lot, and the chapter on inlining code from other languages was diverting; conversely, I can't bring myself to find Unicode even remotely stimulating, and the POE (some sort of event-based framework) chapter didn't do much for me. The testing chapter is a solid addition to the material in Intermediate Perl, and I picked up some pointers to modules to check out, but it didn't feel all that advanced.
This is a book that fits in quite nicely with Intermediate Perl and Programming Perl — it cleans up a few niggling details not well discussed in the former book, without having the intimidating heft of the latter, and also provides a wide ranging overview of several topics and the CPAN solutions for them. As such, it will bring an intermediate programmer up a few notches.
Already advanced Perl programmers may be disappointed, and those hoping for an updated version of the first edition will definitely be out of luck, but if you know what you're getting, and evaluate it on those terms, rather than what the title suggests, I think you'll enjoy it.
Rating: 4 / 5