Product Description

"Perl Cookbook" is a comprehensive collection of problems, solutions, and practical examples for anyone programming in Perl. The book contains hundreds of rigorously reviewed Perl "recipes" and thousands of examples ranging from brief one-liners to complete applications. The second edition of Perl Cookbook has been fully updated for Perl 5.8, with extensive changes for Unicode support, I/O layers, mod_perl, and new technologies that have emerged since the previous edition of the book. Recipes have been updated to include the latest modules. New recipes have been added to every chapter of the book, and some chapters have almost doubled in size. Covered topic areas include: manipulating strings, numbers, dates, arrays, and hashes; pattern matching and text substitutions; references, data structures, objects, and classes; signals and exceptions; screen addressing, menus, and graphical applications; managing other processes; writing secure scripts; client-server programming; Internet applications programming with mail, news, ftp, and telnet; CGI and mod_perl programming; and Web programming. Whether you're a novice or veteran Perl programmer, you'll find Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition to be one of the most useful books on Perl available. Its comfortable discussion style and accurate attention to detail cover just about any topic you'd want to know about. You can get by without having this book in your library, but once you've tried a few of the recipes, you won't want to.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47852 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 927 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In the world of art, a picture can paint a thousand words. In the world of computing a good example does much the same thing.

The Perl Cookbook is a superb collection of coding snippets which cover all manner of subject areas in a fashion that proves suitable for beginners and established programmers alike. From date formatting and text searching to socket programming and creating Internet services, it's all here and each is a little gem.

Authors Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington have done a sterling job of documenting each code snippet through explanatory text and in-line comments which goes a long way to helping the casual user understand what is going on and more importantly, how and why.

As a volume in its own right, the Cookbook is an essential desktop reference for anyone with an interest in programming the language, but combined with O'Reilly's other weighty Perl tomes--Learning Perl, Programming Perl and Advanced Perl Programming--it forms the final piece in one of the most thorough and comprehensive documentation sets for any programming language.

Review
"Perl Cookbook provides an excellent resource in gently guiding newbies and more experienced codes deep into Perl country." Linux User, December 2003 "Highly recommended" - Paul F Johnson, Cvu/ACCU, Febraury 2004

From the Publisher
Find a Perl programmer, and you'll find a copy of Perl Cookbook nearby. Perl Cookbook is a comprehensive collection of problems, solutions, and practical examples for anyone programming in Perl. The book contains hundreds of rigorously reviewed Perl "recipes" and thousands of examples ranging from brief one-liners to complete applications.

The second edition of Perl Cookbook has been fully updated for Perl 5.8, with extensive changes for Unicode support, I/O layers, mod_perl, and new technologies that have emerged since the previous edition of the book. Recipes have been updated to include the latest modules. New recipes have been added to every chapter of the book, and some chapters have almost doubled in size.

Customer Reviews

Buy it ...
The summary line says it all - if you're a Perl programmer, you should buy this book irrespective of whether you're a beginner or an `old hand'.

One of the best (and worst) things about Perl is the fact that 'There's More Than One Way To Do It', and the Cookbook contains a number of useful recipes for a variety of different tasks ranging from simple things like opening files up to data parsers. A downside of this is that just when you think you know the language, the authors come up with another way to do something! The book focuses, rightly, on `everyday' programming applications and as a result the treatment of CGI and databases is lacking but, having said that, perfectly good books are available on both subjects.

Along with O'Reilly's other Perl books, the Cookbook has taken up permanent residence on my desk - the book is *that* good. If you're just getting into Perl programming, you'll learn an awful lot by using the Camel Book in conjunction with the Cookbook.

There are lots of poor computing books out there, but the Cookbook stands head and shoulders above practically everything, but then would you expect anything less from two authors who are pillars of the Perl community?

Just go out and buy it!

Pretty close to perfect.
I bought it thinking it'd be a vast collection of one-liners, but in fact, the solutions seem to average about a page each. But still, I wouldn't be without it now. It's well organised, and I personally find that it's index is pretty close to perfect, head and shoulders over most IT books (I'd say the same about other OI'Reilly books, though - perhaps the other reviewer wants other things from an index?).

The solutions I found most handy are things that tell you how to, say, parse comma delimited stuff, or do certain things to HTML files and URLs.

I found the section on validating email addresses to be one of the best I've found, and it backed me up very well when a client told me that I had to completely validate them.

It is not as readable as the camel book ("Programming Perl"), but fills a complimentary niche.

Basically, if you use perl regularly for many varied tasks, then you probably need this or you will be reinventing the wheel far too often. You'll probably get back the cover price as time saved the very first time you refer to it.

Very close to an excellent book
A useful book for the experienced or amateur programmer, but I would imagine it would not be the easiest read for a complete novice. An average to good knowledge in almost any other proper programming language would help in understanding many of the terms used in this book. This book has obviously not been written with the novice in mind.

A bit of unnecessary flannel exists in this book and makes some areas over complicated, yet in other areas not enough detail exists. This book is most definitely directed at the UNIX side of Perl rather than just Perl. Useful but being so UNIX biased, it occasionally can be a bit difficult adapting to the Windows environment. Although a small attempt has been made at attacking the problems with Windows NT and Perl, there is no reference to lesser OS such as Win98 or 95 and not a mention of the Mac. This is can be frustrating for some whom may wish to use a none UNIX OS. I have used this book many hundreds of times for ideas and reference in the creation of nearly a thousand scripts and packages all of which I have written and tested on Windows 98 machines and then successfully executed on UNIX machines with no changes.

Sadly (like all O-Reilly) books, the index is not as good as it could be. Most programmers who are looking for a solution to a problem don't always know the commonly used name for the answer and the index seems to have been written by someone who knows what they are talking about with Perl. Sounds like a silly comment but most whom would be using this book don't know what they are talking about and if they did why use the book ? That aside the index is moderately useful but most readers will probably find themselves inserting 50 or 60 bookmarks for the most useful parts and examples.

All that said the information embedded in this book is almost as complete as it could possibly be. Many of the examples and snippets in this book can be used directly and come fairly close to useful for real world use. All in all a very good book with moderately easy to understand texts. If you found either 'CGI Programming on the World Wide Web' or the famous Camel 'Programming Perl' remotely useful, this book will knock you back with the amount packed in. Almost everything from both books and more have been seamlessly tied together in this very good book.