Slashdot: The Perl Black Book [Book Review]

“You already know C or BASIC or some other programming
language, but there’s some work you need to finish that none of
these languages are the right tool for. Perhaps you want to create
CGI programs. The Perl Black Book is an excellent choice to fill
that need. It’s a non-nonsense title that’s focused on working
example code in a form that will be familiar to those stepping from
another programming language into Perl.”

“While the book is large, the scope of material it attempts to
cover is considerably larger. Coriolis labels the book as intended
for intermediate to advanced materials, and there’s a minimum of
introduction to general programming concepts. Non-programmers
trying to learn Perl as their first language would be better served
starting with a more introductory title and coming back to this
book later. And while there are examples of things like
object-oriented Perl and CGI, none of that material goes deep
enough to really satisfy a serious student of those topics….”

“The Perl Black Book does an excellent job with the kinds of
things intermediate programmers in the language are interested in.
It’s become the first place I turn to when looking for a snippet of
Perl code to incorporate into a project. An example of why I like
this book should illustrate why that is. I recently found myself
writing a program that needed to ping a host and take some
corrective action if that ping was unsuccessful. I would expect
this is a straightforward request, and looked up “ping” in the
index of O’Reilly’s Programming Perl. This led to an example using
the pingecho library call, which I typed in and found utterly
unsuccessful at the task I was trying to accomplish. Looking up the
same topic in the Perl Black Book, I found a section about twice as
large on the subject. Holzner’s example program worked just as I
was expecting, and I went back to the rest of the application
design without needing to focus for very long on the implementation
details of this small piece. I’ve never liked the code in
Programming Perl because the samples are all so terse. The Perl
Black Book does a much better job in my view of providing programs
long enough to demonstrate the appropriate Perl syntax for filling
common needs.”

Complete
Story